ECTS OF DESIRE

Pnrt I. mL S0lll,l NIN

nft Srlt(h

hen the bodv is thr t r lmary nrodc of pcr( . r ! r i ' [scale, rxn8gerat jon nr u\ rlake p lace in re l . r tk , I r ' ,the balance of m(rr \ r r .monl of f€red as th( | l \ l \er tends in to th€ sf . r , , t , rrmm( 'drntc e\Prnr ' I t 'But pnrndor ic i r l l r , I lxbody i lse l f is n( .ces\nI l lexa8gcrated as s(r ,n . ' , .wc hnve an im.rgf I ' l t l r r

,1, | 1. , \ ' . the body of l ivr t experjcnr(, is subjtcr to .hrni le, rr . ,ns-' ,,:,.,rLL)n, .rnLl. nroit imporr.rntiv, dcarh. rhtl r.r-r,,...r i l , i i ; ,"i ' , r l \ ! l fn l fs the possibi l i tv ofdeath i r ntr( ,nlpts bprcsfnl .r r fnt | r' I r , .1, , ' . .n. l ( 'nce and immortal i ty, a realm ot thc classi( . ) is is lh€, i | , r , e{) tr iect, and thus rhe body as pottnt inl comno(l i rv, , r t , , {

\ Lrhrn lh€ abstract nnd inf ;nire cvcle o( c\chnn8e.i \ i l '1. lhe Ll€velopmtnt of cul ture undcr an exchangc cconomy,

, . , . !L h ror.ruthent ic e\perience and, corrr tnt j ! .el) . , rhe search for \' L rL l l r ' n l r . , , h i r . t hp . / r n i , . r i 1 t - i l

bodv, an imng. s f i ich is a pKr j fc tn,n or obje. r j i ie . l r (D of the l , , r r \

' L 'Lr l In11. objcct beco e cr i t ica l . As exper jcnce is incrras inglv.1, . , r( ! i . tnd nbstrtrcrod, rh( l ived retat ion of the body to the phe_,, , , ( i ldsir , r l ivor ld is r i 'ph.c{!y,g nost i lg ic 'nyth or cont.ct at ld

, ,,,, ",\uthentic" e.f.'ri.nce. t eiomaid,itieinsjvi anrl rlrusivcr . l'h..d bevond the horizon 9f prcsrnr tived experience, the

r. l r rr n hich thc anl jquc, the pastornl , rho exot ic, and orher f ic,1, , , r , ' rn\ .r le. tr t iculatcd In this process oi ( t istan. ing, thc nlemo-I rl,, l,{rl! rs repl.rccd by the m€mory of the obje.t, a nremory' 1,1,, , , i oul \ ide the sel f . rnd ihus pres€nrinU both a surptus dnd lack' :L]L l , ( . I \ (e. The eipcr i( ,ncc of the objoct t ics outside the body,s

i , , r ( , r l 's saturalcd ! t i th meaninBs th:,r wi l l never be ful lv, , Ll t r j u\ Furthern\rrr ' , the ser inl i tv of ncchanicat modcs of

rnkr th€ h.or ld. Ihus the probl€ms in imagininS thc body ar. \ \ I r t ,tonrat ic ol th( ' p(nn€ms in imngining rhe srt f as place, ohj( , f r . , r ; lagtnt at oncc. W(' h,rve seen thar rher€ are a number of wnvs in Nhr l tr lx b, .d\ dnd ih( t^, , r td the ( . \ f ( , i (n( 'eJ anJ th, , ,n, . ,g,n" j . n, , , r , , . , t r ,art iculate and dcl imit each othor. Fi .sr, th€ bodj lv Erotesqu.,r , . r ln ival of fers the possibi l i t ] of ulcorporat ion: the imige is noi . t t r . r h, . , tf rom the body hrre, rnther, i t n loves wirhin the drmocrnt ic 5t,r( , . , ,1carnival , that spice of the facc-kl face communicarion of rhc nr, , ,kctplace. Brt in the niniatur izod world of rhc frcak show, th. h, \ t \ r . ,taken from movrnlent into stasis. Through thr rr.rnscendenr \.r.Np | r n r o l l e r e J b r l h , \ v d r r e t ) n f . t r { l r J L t e a h e h , , d \ , \ m J J c . , r . , t , r , , rrncl n ' f felai ' \q l \ ' . i . somerh" r $hrLh o| ler\ r t \ ,h t , , t \*- . , . r , {rf lcnc€, whi lc the freak shoh, m), sc.,m, ar f i rst glrnce, to be r . i r ,1, t , , rol the grotesque, the distance ir invokes makfs i r jnstend an in\ , . , , .

r ' , rne sennlr tv ot ncchan'cat modcs o lI I 1 , ' , f l { , r ( is us to per . . ' i ! ( that outs ide ds n s ingular and . t ( thrn_, r r , \ l o , hhich rh( obje. t i5 only a t r . r .e .

r1, , , . \ . Dr i8ht iake f l fgr l ns our modr l : ,The t ruth is thus the. lL ' , i . , l r . r r r rc !e l , whcre not n mcmb€r js sobrr ; and bec.ruse every

! , , , t ' \ \ )nor Lreconres det . tchcd rhan i t . , , q ,so col lapses srra iSht. 11, I \ .1 is ius l as much a srnte of t rnnsparenr unbrok. ,n calm.l , r 1 l ' , ( r t t i re i l o i ihc inovcneni , taken.s an unbrokcn quiesccnt, . , r l r , ' t N l r l .h obt i ins d isr incrness in thc course of i ts p() r . ,ss nnd1" . . t \ \ r t ( c \ rs ten.c, is prcserv€d in thc form of a sel f - recouec-

display of pcrfocl ion. lhrough rhc freak we d.,r i ! ,e an jmns. , , r i l r .

1 ] 4 O N L O N G I N C

tion, in which existence is self-knowledge, and self-knowledge,again, is immediate existence."r The rending of the body of the 8odtakes place in the delirium of immediate experience. In this act ofdistortion, dismemberment, and ultimately comPosition, the social isconstituted: w€ have only to think of the authentic con game off€redby Chaucer's Pardoner and the fantashc restoration ofthe relics ofthecrucifixionas they served to delineate the West ftom whatit was not.2

It is no accident that the closing Pitch of the freak show is oftenmanifested by th€ souvenir. Consider this Pitch ftom the end of thegiant and halflady show at Strate's Camival, Washington, D C , in1941. The giant, Mr. Tomainey, says:

And notice the size of the tDndFwatch the hand please and ihe siuof the ring I have here, so large you can Pass a silvei half a doUarright through the center of the ring

Watch this, a silver half a dollar riSht thrcugh the Siant lucky rin8,believe it or not

Right through the center of the ringNow each one of these rings have ny name and occuPation engraved

on them, and I'm Eoing to Pass them out now for souvenirs, andthis is how I do it

I have here a little booklet, tells vou all about our married life, has thelife story, photograPhs of both of us and ten qu€stions and answerspertaining to our marricd life and

Now all vou care to know about us two is in this bookletNow we sell the booklet for 10c and for each and everv booklet we

giv€ away one of th€se Siant lu.ky nngsNow if you care to take home an int€resting souvenir of the cir.us,

hold up your dimes and l'll be very glad to wait on you10c is all they are.3

) The souvenir both offe6 a measurement for the normal and authenti-'| cates the experienc€ of the viewer. The giant begins with the two

i. authenticating sitns of odgin: the $aph itself and the mark uPon thei world made by his labor. As we saw in the discussion of the bodily

Srotesque, the freak show as spectacle permits a voyeurism which isat once transcendent and distanced. Thus a miniaturization is eFfected through the viewer's stance no matter what the obtect is. Fur-thermore, the marriage of the freaks Fesents a ProPortionality ofextremesi the cultuml sign triumPhs over the limits of the natural.This souvenir domesticates the gotesque on the level of content,subsumint the sexual facts to the culturat code. But the souveni alsodomgqlis3t9g o!-ftrelelrlel.llc-sPera. -o!'--9:!9f!al exPeriena6is inter-naliAa;-lbr t;st is tak"" ho^e. r r'e gini'. ring islr,c.*y because iltti!_:g-iy9d-!€tE'-gj-1,"irks rhe tr"ansferenc; of oriptrn Io trace,'

135 oarEcl"s oa D[slRf

Toving from gvsnt to'rrr..neryrnd dfsirt:Liie all weddint rin8s, il isa=sduvenir of lhe ioining of lhe Lircle, the seamless perfection otjoined asymm€trical halves- But in this case th€re is a second dis-placement of that event in the proporfional joininS of disproportion-ate parts. The giant repres€nts €xcess; the half-lady, impoverishment.And the audience is now witness to this spectacle of culture forcingnatue into the harmonic.

We mi8ht say thal this cdpdc(y 01 objects to 5erve as lrdces of Iauthentic experrence is, in facl, e\emplified by the -ouvenir. fhe Isouvenir distinguishes experiences- We do not need or desire sou- ]venirs of events that are repeatable. Rather we need and desire sou- jvenirs of events that are r€portable, events whose materiality has Iescaped us, events that ther€by exist only through the invention ofnarrative, Through narrative the souvenir substitutes a context ofperPetual consumption for its context of ori8in. It r€presents not thelived experience of its mak€r but the "secondhand" experience of itspossessor/owner. Like the collection, it always displays the romanceof contraband, for ifs scandal is its removal from its "natutal" loca-tion. Yet it is only by means of its mat€rial relation to that location thatit acquircs its value. In this is the tradition of "fi$lday covers" forstamps and the disappointment we f€el in rec€ivint a postcard fromthe sende/s home rather than from the depicted sight. The souv€nirspeaks to a context of oriSin through a language of longing, Ior it isnotan object arising out ofneed or use value, it is an object arising outof the necessarily insatiable demands of nostalgia. The souvenir gen-entes a narrative which reaches only "behind," spiraiing in a con-tinually inward movement rather than outward toward the futuie.Here we find the structure ofFrcud's description of the genesig of thefelirh: a part of the body is substituted for th€ whole, oi an object issubstituted for the part, until finally, and invers€ly, the whole bodycan become object, substituting for the whole. Thus we have thesystematic tnnsformation of the obiect into its own impossibility, itsloss and the simultaneous experience of a difference which Fr€udcharacterizes as the fetishist's both knowing and not knowint th€anatomical distinctions b€tween the sexes. Metaphor, by the par-tiality of its substituting power, is, in fact, attached to metonymyhere. The possession of the metonymic object is a kind of disposses-sion in that the presence of the obiect all the more radically speaks toits status as a mere substitution and to its subsequent distance fromthe self. This distance is not simply experienced as a loss; it is also .jexp€rienced as a surplus of signification. It is experienced, as is the ;loss of the dual relation with the moth€r, as catastrophe and ioris$r.e Isimultaneously.a

1 3 6 O N L O N G I N G

The souvenir is by definition always incomplete. And this in-coiilpleteness works on two levels- First, the obiect is metonymic toIhe scene of its original appropriation in the sense that it is a sample.If I save the ribbon from a corsage/ the souvenir is, in Eco's terms, ahomomaterial replica, a metonymic reference existint between ob-iect/part and object/whole in which the part is of the matenal of theori8inal and thus a "pa ial double."s Within the operation of the

\ souvenir/ the sign functions not so much as object to ob,ect, butbeyond this relation, metonymically, as object to €vent/exp€rience.The ribbon may be metonymic to the co$age, but the corsage is inturn metonymic to an increasingly abstract, and hence increasingly"lost," set of referents: the gown, the dance, the particular occasion,the paticulai spring, all springs, romance, etc. Furthermore, a sou-v€nir does not necessaiily have to b€ a homomatedal replica. lf Ipurchase a plastic miniatur€ of the EiJfel Tower as a souvenir of mytrip to Paris, the object is not a homomaterial one; it is a representa-tion in another medium, But whether the souvenir is a material sam-ple or not, it will still exist as a sample of the now-distanced experi-ence/ an experience which the obiect can only evoke and resonate to,and can nevei entirely recoup. ln fact, if it .o!ld recoup the experi-

1 ence, itwould erase its own partiality, that patiatty which is the veryI source of its power Second. the souvenir must remain impoverishedi and parfial so lhal it cdn be supplemented b) a ndrrative discourse, a

,/ narrative discouse which aiticulates the play of desire. The plasticreplica of th€ Eiffel Tower does not define and delimit the Eiffel Tow-

. er for us in the wav that an archit€ct's model would define and delim-

fit a t"itai"g. The souvenir r€plica is an alusion and not a model, it

i_ | comes after lhe fact and remdins both partial to and more erpansive_' I than Lhe facl. ll will not fu nction wjthout the supplementary nanative

I discourse that both attaches it to its origins and creates a myth withJ reFrd to those origins.

What is this na ative of origins? lt is a narrative of interiority andauthenticity. Iijr not a narrarive of tbgr+tee{i+li3 nag4tive oJ thep€S:19-Is-:9qs!g!-!Drf9!s[qriqsitv has Ltt]e ir anv valueaLlached lo ils malerialiN. lurthermore. the souvenir is often at-tatF6tFtb lo_cations and experiences that are not for sale.6 The sub-stitutinS powff of the souvenir operates within the following analo-gyr as experience is to an imaSined point of authenticity, so narrativeis to the souvenir. The souvenir displaces the point of authenticity asit itself becomes the point of oridn for nanative. Such a narrativecannot be generalized io encompass the experience of anyone; it per-tains only to the possessor of the obiect. It is a narative which seeksto reconcile the disparity between interiority and exteriority, subject

137 oBlEcTs oF DESTRE

and obiect, signiher and sitnified. We cannot be proud of someoneels€{s souveni unless the naffative is €xtended to include our r€la-tionship with the objeds owner or unless, as we shall see later, wetransform the souvenir into the collection. This vicarious position. wemitht note, is that of the owner of the heirloom. For example, consid-er the plot of John P. Marquand's ^ovel The l"7te George Apley-ANooel in the Form of a Menoil, in which a family bitterly quanels overthe disputed possession of "a badly worn squaie of caryet uponwhich Genenl Lalayefte inadvertently spilled a glass ofMadeira dur-int his visit to Boston." Such a memento is a souvenir of€veryone inthe family and ofno one in the family. Its possession is a stat€ment ofmembership, not in the €v€nt, but in the prestige generated by theevent. The narrative of origins Senerated is in effect a genealoSy, asVeblen suggested when he wrote that anything giving evidence thatwealth has been in a family for several 8€nerations has particularvedue to the leisure classes. The function of the h€irloom is to weave,quite literally bymeans ofnanative, a sitnificance ofblood relation atthe expense of a larter view of history and causality. Similarly, thewide availability of hith-quality photogaphs of various tourist sithtsdoes not cancel out the attraction of takint one's own pictures ofpublic sithts or the continual production of tour books with titlessuch as "My Fmnce."

In his work on tourism, D€an Maccannell notes that while sithtsand attractions are collect€d by entire societies, souvenirs arc col-lected by individual tourists.T Descdbing some t,?ical souvenirs,Maccannell writes:

In addition to matchbooks, postcards, pencils and ashhays thal carrythe name and/or the picture of a sight, there are the less common itemssuch as touishc dish towels and dust cloths overprinted with drawingsof Betsy Ross Hous€ or Ab.aham Lincoln's Birthplace. Thes€ aie notinlended to serve their original purposes, but are fixed instead so theycan be hug on kitchen walls. There is also a special twe of squarepillow covered with a whit€ silklike clolh, fiinged in gold braid, that ismade to s€rye as the cnvas for little paintings of sights like NiagaraFalls. Th€se latler it€ms are spurious €lements that have come out oft]te closet, ocopying visible plac€s in the domestic environment.3

Whether or not such items are "spurious" is beside the point. From adilferent point of view, what is being effected here is the transforma-tion of exterior into interior._ Spatially, as any postcard t€lls us, thisworks most oflen lhroueh a reduction of dimensions. the souvenirreouces tne pubLrc, tne monumentdl , and the tnree-drmensronal rnlothe miniatu;, that which can be enveloped by the body, or into thetwo-dimensional representation, that which can be appropiated

1 3 8 o N L o N c r N c

within the privatized view of the individual subiect. The photographas solvenir is a loSical extension of the press€d flower, ihe preserya-tion of an instant in time through a reduction of physical dimensionsand a corresponding increase in significance supplied by means ofnarrative. The silence of the photograph. its promise of visual inti-macy at the expense of the other senses (its glossy surface reflectintus back and refusing us penetmtion), makes the eruption of thatnarrative, the tellint of its story, all the more poignant. For the narra-tion of the photognph will itselfbecome an object of nostalgia- With-out markin& all ancestors become abstractions, losing their propernames; all family trips become the same Fip-the formal garden, thewaterfall, the picnic site, and the undifferentiated sea becofte at,tributes of every country.

T€mporally, the souvenir moves history into private time. Hencethe absolute appropriateness of the souv€nir as ccrefldor. Such a sou-venir might mark the privatization of a public symbol (say, the Lib€r-ty Bell miniatudzed), the juxtaposition of history with a personalizedpresent (say, the year 126 posited against today's dare with its con-current pdvate "dates"), and the concomitant transformation of agenerally purchasable, mass-produc€d obiect (the material souvenir)into private possession (the referent beinS "my trip to Philadelphia,,).That remarkable souvenir, the postcard, is characteried by a complexprocess of captioning and display which rep€ats this transformationo{ public into private. First, as a mass-produced view of a culturallyarticulaled site, the post(ard is purchased. Yet this purchase, taking/place within an "duthent ic" (onle\t of the si te i tsel f , appears as a kind

lof private experience as the self recoverc the obiect, inscribint thethandwritint of the personal bcneath the more uniform caption of rhe'l social. Then in d testure which recapitulales the social's articulation

fl of the self lhal is, the testure of the 8/i by which the subiecr is

l,/ positioned as place of production and rcreption of obligation-Ure

I postcard is surrendered toa sitnificant other. The othe/s reception of

I the postcard is the receipt, the ticket stub, that vaudates the eiperi-l\ ence of the site, which we now can name as the site of the subject\\ himself or he.s€lf.\ We must distinguish between souv€nirs of exte or sights, sou-venir3 such as those Maccannell lists, which most often a;eDresen-tations and are purchasabte, and souvenirs of individual expenence,which most often are samples and are not availdble as teneral con-sumer gods. In fact, if children arc the maior consume$ of mass-produced souvenirs, it is most likely because they, unlike adults,have few souvenirs of the second type and thus must tle able to

139 OBIEC'TS OF DESIRE

instantly purchase a sign of their own life histories. The souvenir ofthe s€cond type is intimatety mapped against the Iife history ot anindividuat it tends to be found in connection with rites of passage(birth, initiation, marriate, and death) as the material sign oi an tb-stracl refercntr transformation of status. Such souveni; are rarelvlepl sinSly; instead they form a (ompendium which rs an autobiogra-phy. Scrapbook, memory quilrs, phoro albums, and baby booki aUserve as examples. It is significant that such souvenirs oft€n appropri-ate certain aspecls of the book in teneralj we might note especiallythe way in which an exterior of Iittle material value envelops d treat"interior significance," and the way both souvenir and book iran-scend their partioiar contexts. Yet at the same time, these souvenirsabsolutely deny the book's mode of mechanical reproduction. youcannot make a copy of a scrapbook without being painfully awarethat you poss€ss a mere representation of the oridnal. The oritinalwil always supplant the copy in a wdy thar is not open ro lhe prod,ucts of mechanical reproduction.o Thus, while the personal memento .ris oflittle material worth, often arising, for€xample, amid the salvage Icrafts such as quilt-makjng and embroidery, it is of great worth to ;ts llpossessor. Be(ause of its connection to biography and its place in llconstituting th€ notion of the individual life, the memenro becomes llemblematic of the worth of th.t lifeand of the selfs capacity to gener-,1ate worthiness. Here we see also the introduction of the metaDhor of Itextue. From the child's ori8inal melonymic disDlacement'to the r'love-obiect, the sensual rules iuvenirs of ihis type. The acute sensa- (tron of the obiecr-its per(eprion by hand raking precedence over its IpercepboJr by eye-promises, and yet does not keep th€ promise of, Ifpruirr. Perhaps our preference for instant brown{oning of photo-

'

gaphs, distressed antiques, and pr€faded blue jeans retates io this ,-suJfusion of the um.

Distattcc anil Intitnac!

The double function of the souvenir is to authenticate a past or .\otherwis€ remote experience and, at the same time, io-discredil tfre ipres€nt. The present is either too imperconal, too looming, d; tooalienating compared to the intimate and di.rect experience of contactwhich Lhe souvenir has as irs referent. This refer;nt is authenticitg.What lies between here and there is oblivion, a void markiie;l;ai;l-separahon betw€en past and present. The nostalgia of the souvenirplays in the distance between the pr€sent and an imagined, pretap- i]sarian exp€ri€nce, experience as it mitht be "directly lived.,, The'l

" I t ' t " ' ;

l r lo oN LoNc lNc

fbcation of authenticity becomes whatever is distant to the presentItime and space; hence we can see the souvenir as attached to thel lant ique and the e\ot ic.

J The antique as souv€nrr always bedrs the burden of nostaltia for

I expenenc€ impossibly distant in time: the experience of the famiiy,I the villag€, th€ firsthand community. One can better understand the

antiqu€'s stake in the creation ofan intimate distance if the antique iscontrasted to the physical relic, the souvenir of the dead which is themere material remains of what had possess€d human sigflficance.B€cause they are souveniB of death, the relic, the hunting trophy,.and the scalp are al lhe salne time the most intensely pol.nrrhl sou-ftenirs and the mosl potent anrisouvenirs. They ha;k'rhe horrible

e lFanstormation of meaning into materiaiify more than they mark, aslbth€r souvenirs do, the transformation of materiality into meanint. If';the function of the souvenir proper is to cr€ate a continuous and/personal narative of the past, the iuncion of such souvenirs of deathlis to disrupt and disclaim that continuity. Souvenirs of the mortal'body are not so much a nostalgic celebralion of the past as they are anlerasure of lhe significan(e of history. Consider the function of suchsouv€nirs in the contagious and malevolent madc of voodoo. Orconsider th€ enormous display of hunting tmphies staged as "Thelntemational Competitive Show" by Hermann c6ring in 1937 as a

apremonition of the dealh camps dnd tI!:_ir _atlgtnpted _ru:gation o-fl$fieaning. ln contrast to the restordtion of{ered by suchgestur€sas t}e

dy return of sainls' relics, these souvenirs mark the end of sacred narra.\u tive and the inre4ection of the curse. lronically, such phenom€na

themselves can later be reframed in an ensuing metonymic displace-ment such as th€ punk and kitsch appropriations of fascist marerialculture.

Cataclysmic and apocalyptic theories of history and personalityrefuse the continuity of experience. But in antiquarianism we s€e atheory of history informed by an aesthetics of the souvenir. Anti-quaianism always displays a functionat ambivalence; we find eitherthe nostalgic desip of romanticism or the political desire of authen-tication at its base. For the royal antiquarians of Norway, Sweden,and England during the Renaissance, the collection of antiquities wastenerally potjticaLly supported and politjc.Uy motivated. Such collec-fion was most commonly used to authenticate the history of king-doms. In the case of John Leyland, for example, who was appointedking's antiquary in 1533, the same year thar Henry \4II declaredhimself head of the Church of England, a survey of British antiquitieswas to serve the surrogate purpose of secularizing and lo(alizing that

l4l o8lEcls or DE5IRE

history.. Camden's Bnfia"ria (t586) similarly was intended to supptanipapal history wirh national history. However, in the late sevenieenthand early eighteenth centuries the motivation of antiquarianism be_came more complicated. On the one hand, Henrv Bo;rne,s /nllrxr_tates VulSarcs (1725) was designed ro expose th; pagan ana papistrerKs survrvrng among the (ommon people in order to ridictrle suchpmctices. On the other hand, tohn Aubrey,s Briel Lixes and Mis-ellanps a d his studies of the ',naturat hisr;ries,, a;d antiouities ofStrrrey and Wiitshire, all .ss€mbted in rhe 1690,s, were, if we canforgive the anachronism, a premonition of a later romanticism, for inAubrey's works antiquities are symbotic of a dyint English past rhatshould be respectfuly recorded and studied.

Aubrey's reverence for the past may well have come from the tlturmoil of the pres€nt's .evolution. As commerciatism and industrial- Iism transformed the British landscape, the artifacts and architectur€ |of a disintegratint rural cutture became rhe objects of middle- and llupperdass nostalgia. Early in lhe ninereenrh c;ntury, James Srorer'and I. Greit wrote in the advertisement for the-j. Antiquarian and Tooo-gtaphical C.abind. Containin| a Series ol Elegan! Vi?us of the Mosr l\tercst'nB Obj?ds of Curiosity in arcat Bnr;in (iS07-t8ll): r,By the conrinu_anc€-ofsuch patronage, the futtiquarian and Topographical Cabinetwru be hastening to preserve the lineaments of the most venerableremains of Antiquity which Time is increasingly whittleing away bynearly imperceptible atoms."ro Antiquariian societies-first appearingin Britain in 1572, suppressed during the reign oftames l, ;;d rcin-stated in U18-'{ontinued to be popular into the late nin€teenth cen-tury. YeL as was the case with Aubrey, they were subject to particularhistorical circumstances that varied the wavs in which th€v formu-laled their values. Their suppression duringthe lacobean pJriod wasa consequence of their danterow capacity to revive the political alle-giances of chivalry as they revived a more generalized taste for thechivalric past. Similarly, the specific cont€nt of nationalism changedov€r time and space. B€tween the time of Camden and the time of theVictorian antiquarians, nationalism became romantic nationalism inEntland, a veneration of pastoralism, decentralization, and a collec-tive "folk spinl." But in the New World, for example, antiquarianismcentered on the discovery of a radical cultural othei, the Naive Amer- Iican, whose narative could not easily be made continuous with ei Ither the remote past or the present as constructed by non-nativehistorians. The Englishman loseph Hunrer explains in the preface roh;s Antiquarin Notices ol LuWt, the Heath, Sharlston, and Ackton, in theCornty of York 0a5l)l

1 4 2 0 N L O N C T N C

There are h{o sods of counlrics lhal divide lhe face of the glob€, ,t.r,countri.s and o1.1. . . . whi.h of the* two $rts of ountries would aman of rell€ction, a man of taste, a man whose hean beats with moralp€rceptions and feelings, choos€ lo dwell in? . . . I conceive it to b€ oneof the advantages which the forlune of my bidh .es€Ned for me, thal Iwas born in an o/d.o!tr1ry. . . . I love to dwell in a .ountly where, onwhichever side I tum, I find some object connect€d with a hean-movinS tale, or some scene wherc lhe de€pest interests of a nation foraSes to su.ceed have been sl.enuously agitat€d, and emphaticallydecided [Hunter's enipses].

llln works such as Hunte/s, the dntique is linked to the childhood ofl, the nation, to the pastoral, and to the origin of narrative.

It is 4 lq&ical-d€velopment of the souvenir's capacity for nanativethat by 1845 ihe term /oiklore had replaced the tetm antt4uity. As theevolutionist Andrew Lang wrote: "Now when we find widely andevenly distributed in the ea h's surface the rude flint tools of rnen,we retard these as the oldest examples of human skill. Are we notequally justified in regarding the widely and evenly dishibuted b€-liefs in ghosts, kelpies, fairies, wild women of the forests (which areprecisely the same in Brittany as in New Caledonia) as among theoldest e&mples of the working of human fancy?"u @LFaditionswere thus seen as the abstrdct equrvalent to material cul turer lty'here4s

. :-:-' ',.-._ 1-ordl lrad'tion obvrorrsly canqot "tF*in Ihd frme seis€ mafthephys-ldStraRilacIian. legends and tales were considered by antiquarians ofthe survlvCli scFool-as examples o( earlier stages of civilization lesid-ing amid the discouise of the p!es!!t. For such a theory of oral tradi-tions to exist; it was necessary that a distinction be made b€tvreendialect and standard, between dec€ntralized and centralized lan-g;;;;*F"i F;a fgun to develop was the ibstract language ofBcience and the state. Forsyth's Antiqr./.ry's Porfolio (1825) promisedthat within its pages "the philosopher w l meet with entertainmentof a nobler kind, by being enabled to contrast the deplorable state ofthe human mind at remote periods, with the present happy triumphof unf€ttered reason, and of a relition that is comparatively pure andPetfect."lz

Thus the antiquarian seeks to both distance and appiopriate thepast. In order to entertain an antiquarian sensibility, a rupture in

i historicafcoriiciousinbss rnust iave ocqrsed; areatinA a sense that' o'r-e-saa -q!g-q!s " aulLCllglg qtle'---ai"tur1-r ana JGiontinuous.

iTime must be seen as concomitant with a loss of understanding, a

lloss whith can be reliev€d through the reawakening of objecls and,\lhereby, a reawakening of narrative. In a poem, "Time's Footsteps,"

113 oBIEcrs oF DEslRE

printed in the First volume of Thc A riquatia Masazrne aad Bdtogra-t,/rr (t882), H. R. Wadmore wroie:

The book, the piclure. helmer wilh irs crest.The shield, th€ sp€d, the sword, rhe armour briqhr,All on the past can shed a llood of light;The crozier of the bishop now at rest_

All that is past w€ s€ek to treasure here,AU rhat ruy m.ke the pasr d thing of tife.And we would sve what els€ in worldty srrileMiSht perish, though th€ pres€nr hold ir dear.

Accompanying this awakening of obiects is the obj€ctification of thep€as:rnt classes, the aestheticization of rural life which makes that life"quaint," a survival ofan elusive and purer, yet diminish€d, past. Incontrast to the historian, who looks for design and causality, thernt iquarian searches for mdter ial evidence of thc pdst. Yet nt th€ sdmetime, the antiquarian searches for an internal relation between pastand present which is made possible by their absolute disruption.t{ence his or her 6€arch iq+rio4lily an aesthetir one. an drrempt lo

"f3-ll9 .j!3!!a!Lgq"J to creare an imdsined pdst which i5

avarl.ble lor_con5ulphon. In order to awak€n the dead, the anh_quarian mu-st first man.ge to kill lhem. Thu5, in this aestheric Bede,we se€ repeated Lacan's formulation that the symbol manifests itsetffirSf ofemfna mur<Gr Aflhe thini anal that this death constitutes inthe-ubiect the etemdlization of his or hir deslie. it

tvery aspecl ol peasant and rural hfe, from tools to ar(hitecture todialect to "beint" itselfin the form of " the cha racter,,, becomes underantiquarianism a potential souvenir. And the impulse of su€h sou-venirs is to simultdneously transform natur€ into art as they mournthe loss of "pure nature" al a point of origin. By the Romantics,antiquariarusm is completely bound up wilh the picture)que. lrancisCrose's iournal, Thc Antiquaia'L Repeitory. pubtished beiween 1775and 1784, advertis€d itself as "a miscellany, intended to pres€rve andillustrate, several valuable remains ofold iimes, adorned with elecantrulptures." tlcle-isiail]s-5c5ir-s_tatue, once dtain: lhe antique iskansformed into the tableau through the prints and plates that ac-cg!qP3!y !!!ill\Li-ot such anbquarian wo*s. Indeed, antiqudrianbook are often billed as "portfolios" or "cabinets." William HenryPy^e's Micrt6m; or, A Pitlurcque Delineation ol the Arts, Agricultui,and Manulactwes of crcat Britai in a Seties ofa Thousand Grcups of SnattFiSures for the Embellish,ne t ol Inrdstolv lt8/ls), for example, was de-sitned "to pres€nt the student and the amateur with picturesque

I 4 4 O N L O N G I N C

representations of the scenery of active life in Great Bdtain." Such awork tnnsforms labor into abstraction, nahrre into art, and historyinto still life iust as eighteenthrentury and Victorian souvenirs ofnature (sea shells, leaves, butterflies placed under dass), as wel ascontemporary "snow balls" (ihos€ souvenirs in which repres€nta-tions of localions are pla€ed alont with particles of "snow" or glitterwithin water-filled plastic sphercs),-9lqlna_lize,-arrt]l.irol.roenlbyclosinA it ofllqltbgplgsibility ot liv€d exF,erience. Ttley deny themgq94-.9l4eelh-by'rmpo5iilC.the stask-of eR €t€rnald€ath

PSSq",€,the,.ld!rld--afube-$q"/enk €ffe6 transc€ndence to theviglSg !g!e]:b-S..999! qs g Eiliatudzed e4e. as areduction in physi-cal dimensions corresponding to an ilc{eas.e in sig!ficance, and asaninrerEElrQ; of an;iibiii;; But-wiriti rhe min;ature obiecr ofrenspeaks to the past, it encapsulates the time of produchon. Miniatureobjects are most often exaggerahons of the attention to d€tail, preci-sion, and balance that is characteristic of artisanal culture-a culturewhich, with the possible exception of microtechnology (the majorcontemporary producer of miniatures), is considered to have beenlostat the dawn of industrial production. The antiquarian is nostalgic

e for use value, for obiects that characterized the preindustlial village' economy. Such obiects, surviving their oridnal contexts, are seen astraces of the way of life that once surrounded them, Hence we seethat popular form of restaurant d€cor in which preindustrial hand

, tools are tacked on the walls as if they were prints or paintints.

/ Yet once the miniature becomes souvenir, it spealG not so much to

Ithe time of production as to the time of consumption. For example, aI tmditional basket-maker might make miniatures ofhis goods to sell astoys just as he makes full-sized baskets for carrying wood or eggs. Butas the market for his full-sized baskets decreases because of chanses

. in the economic system, such miniature baskets increase in dema;d.l They are no longer models; rather, they are souvenirs of a mode ofj consumption which is now extinct. They have moved from the do-I main of use value to the domain of gifl, wher€ exchante is abstractedI to the level of social relations and awavfrom the levelof materialsandI processes.la The opening to si?rr Ma;fler (1861) articulates the begin-

ning of a similar transition: "ln the days when the spinning wheelshummed busily in the farmhouses-and even treat ladies, dothed insilk and thread lace, had their toy spinnint wh€els of polished oal-there mitht be seen, in districts far away among the lanes, or deep inthe bosom of the hills, certain pallid undersized men who, by the sideof the brawny countryfolk, looked like the remnants of a disinheritedrace." For Eliot this transition was, as she had written in ?41,'r B€dt(1859), the movement from "Old Leisure" to "amusement": "L€isure

145 OBIECT5 Or D€5IRE

rs tone-tone where the spinning whe€ls are gone, and the pack_horses, and the slow wa8gons, and rhe pedhr;, who broughi bar-gains to the door on sunny afternoons. Ingenious philosop[ers tellyou, perhaps, that the grcat work of the steam-engine is to createleisure for mankind. Do not believe themi it only creJes a vacuum foreater thouthl to rush in."rt The sphning wheel has splil alont dasslines in the first cds€, from use vitue inio toy; in the second it hasdisappeared as a lool entilely. Eliot here offeis a premonition of anentire way of life transformed fn5m-pi6-duEi6i-i6-i6i-fifipfi6fr:-the'.F rthe cuture ol tounsm. We see this safte transformation from indLrs_ner prthal pro.t".h^. r^ rhc .F..r".re .vFr and oyer ag4in in the curr€nt

.c!i'! 9l b-te, clPitaEa Flint, Michigan, for example, recently an-nouncecl that it would solve its Depressionlevel unemploymentproblem by creating an Auto-World, a Disneyland of th€ auromobiteindxstry which is erpected to draw tourisis from all parts of lhe8loDe.

Separation aful Restototion

Th€ delicate and hermetic world of the souvenir is a world ofnature idealized; nature is removed from the domain of struttle intothe domestic sphere oI the individualand the interior. The soir-venir isused most often to evoke a voluntary memory of childhood, a motifwe find either in souvenirc, such as scrapbooks, of the individual lifehistory or in the larger antiquarian lheme of the childhood of thenation/race. This childhood is not a chitdhood as lived; it is a child-hood voluntarily r€membered, a chitdhood manufactured fiom itsmaterial survivdls. Thus it is a collate made of presents rather than areawatening of d past. As in an album of photographs or a (ollectionof antiquarian relcs, the past is construcied fro-m a set of presentlye\isting piece@ec;and-lheir rcrcFntq Only the ;(t of memory consfitutes thei; re-semblance. And it ':jl!Ig_tgp_!S!!y!9n resenblance and idenlitythal nostalgicdesirearises ThF n..r , lg i . ie.namoredoLdistance, noloflhe referent itself. Nostalgia cannot be sustained without loss. Fortne nostaltrc to r€acn his or her goal of closint the gap betweenresemblance and identity. /iued exp;rience would"have io iake place,an €rasur€ of the 6ap betwe€n sign and signified, an

""p"riencewruch would.ancet out the desire thdt is nostal t ia,s reason for

In the cultivation of distance which we find in the uses of thesouvenir-the distance of childhoad and the antioue_the third lacet

1 4 6 O N L O N G I N C

is distance in space-th€ souvenir of the exotic. lust as authenticity6nd interiority are placed in the remote past, the exotic offers anauthenticity of experience tied up with notions of the primitive aschild and the primitive as an earlier and purer stage of contemporarycivilization. Jean Baudrillard writes in l" Systime drs oDiets that theexotic obiect, like the antique, functions to lend authenticity to theabstract system of modem objects, and he suttests ihat the indite-nous obiect fascinates by means of its anteriority. This anteriority ischaracteristic both of the exotic object'E form and its mode of fabrica-tion and links it to the analogously anterior world of childhood and itstoys.r6 Thus the authenticity of the exotic object alis€s not in theconditions authored by the primitive orlture its€lf but trom the analo-

ty betw€en the primitive/exotic and the origin of the possessor, theauthentic "nature" of that radical otherness which is the possessorr'sown childhood. In Baudduard's terms, modem is "cold" and theantique and the exotic arc "warm" b€cause contempodry mytholo$/places the latter obiects in a childhood remote from the abstractions ofcontemporary consumer society. Such objects allow one to be a tour-istof one's own life,{or allow the tourist to appropdate, consume, andthereby "tame" the cultural other)

Just as in reverie, narrative is us€d lo invent the symtlolic, so by asimilar process travel writint functions to miniaturize and interiorizethose distanc€d experiences which r€main outsid€ cont€mporarylived relations. The tourist seeks out objects and scenes, and therelation between the otject and its sitht is continued, indeed articu-lated, in the operation of the souvenfu. Rohrt Jennings and Com-pany's tourist books from the 183)'s are typical of this romantic ten-rc. ln The Tourist in Biscay and the Castilles, ̂ fhomas Roscoe writ€s ofBayonne: "Being involuntarily detained, we employed the leiEurethus crcated in seeking out the picturesque, which generally lurk,like u-nassuming characters, in quiet and out-oathe-way places. Norwere we by any means unsuccessful in our pilgrimage, though diiewas the number oI dfuty lanes and alleys, both within and $rithout thewalls, which we threaded in search of it. In spite of th€ spiit ofimprovement, numbers of antique houses, not at all dilapidated, arestill found here, and each of these would forr an interesting studyfor the pencil."rT While Roscoe emphasizes the picturesque, W. H.tlarrison, in The Touisl in Portugal, has a more antiquarian focus,concluding that th€ reader has been presented with "a[ th€ objectswe deemed wo hy of his attention. . . and all we know aboutthem."13 The function of the lqu-r is the esEantemen_t of_oblects-tomake wh;t i.-iGFfufi;F-ulface, eveal a profound interiodtittuouth narative- This interiority is that of the perE€iving subiect; it

'147 OBIECTS OF DESTRE

is_gtined at the expense otiskint @rladr'flalio, (hence rhe dire anddirty hnes) and the dissolurion of the boundary of lhat subiect. Theprocess ls later'reiipituiirt;.r" s"tety wi in tlre mnterr of thelamitiar, thelrbni€; by means of.the souvenir.

. lne.exohc ob,ect representsdistance appropriatedj it is sy:mptoma_

bc ot the more general cultural imperialism that is lourism;s siock inFade, to have a souvenir of the exotic is to possess both a specimenand a bophy; on the one hand, the obie(t must be marked a;exteriorand toreign, on the other it must be marked as arisins directlv out of Lan irhmediate experience of iG possessor. II is thus p'iaced wihtn an Iintimate distance; space is tmnsformed into interioriiy, into ,,oerson_ Idl" space, iust as time is transformed into Interionry i; rh€ casL of rhe Iantique obiect. Consider Gullive/s souvenirs of hii adventures: from ILillipul the_cattle, sheep, gold pieces, and ,his Maiesry,s picture artull l€n8th"; from Brobdingnag ,,the smalt co ection of rinties,,_"the comb I had contrived out ofthe stumps of the Kint,s Beard; andanotherof the same Materials, but fixed inao a parint of-herMaiesty,sThumb-nail, which served for the Back,,, the collection of needles a'ndprns, somecombings from the queen,s hair and her rings, a corn cutrnom a mad ol honofs toe, his breeches made of mouse,s skin, and aiootman's tooth. These souvenirc sefte as evidence of Gullivels ex_p€rience and as measurements of his own scale iust as the tiant,s ringand booklet serve to authenticate the audience s experienie. L e aiicuriosities, thes€ souvenirc function to generate narrative. More thanlne souvenirs ofLilliput, which are most often whole and animal andserve.as models and representative elements of sels, the souvenjrs ofttrobdngnat are partial and human; they are samples of the bodywtucn srmuthneously estrange us from the body. But unlike the sou_venirs of mortality discussed eailier, these souvenirs are taboo itemscollected hom the bod/s refuse. These beard stumps, nail parines,hair combinSs, and corns do not diminish the bodv bv ttreir aUse,ic.or appropriationj rather, rhey speak to irs dual cipaltes of ercessand reteneration. They transform the human into ihe other and yetdrlow the possessor to intimately know that other in parts. Cullivir,ssouvenirs of BroHingnag are not,,ordinary,,: they;peak to his de-gre€ of involvement with th€ Brobdingnagians_iis partiat yet inti-mate \,lsion. They are "authentic,, souvenirs in the same way that theobjeds of mdFc?l.tasks in fairy rates (,,you musr bring me ttiree hairstrom the dant's head") are evidence of an e\peri;ce that is notricanous but lived within an estran8ed or dangerous intimacv. Thevacquire their value only wirhin rhe (ontext of Cultive/s narraHv;;wlrnout such a narr.tive, they are not only meaningless, they are alsoexaggerations of the disposable.

1 4 8 0 N L O N C t N C

r Unlike the ancient obiecl, which, thouSh it arises ftom the distant

/fpast, is endowed with a frmilianty rn*" "-", " than the Present,llthe exotic obiect is to some detree danterous, even "hot." Removed

llffrom its conlerl, the eroh( souvenir is a sign of sur.vi!41 -not its own

l lsurvival , but the survival of the possessot outside his or her ownrlcontext of familiarity. lts othemess speak to the possessot/s cdPacity

tForotherness: it is the possessor, not the souvenir, which is ultimately

llhe curiosity. Ihe danSer of the souvenir lies in its unfamiliarity, inlour difficulty in subiecting it to interprelation. There is always the

lpossibility that reverie's signification wil! go out of control here, that

Ithe object itself will take charge, awakening some dormant capacity

I for destruction. This appropriation of reverie by the obiect forms the

lbasis for certain horror stories: "The Monkey's Paw," or the ghost

I stories.of M. R. James, for example. In sqch tdles curiosity i< 'enli.ed

lby !adersl,a44i4g gdyjt.(hespeds€ eJ the possessols w€tl-beint-

J In most souvenirs of the exotic, however, the metaphor in oP€ra-

, tion is again one of tamin& the souvenir rclains its sisniJyint caPacity

Ponly in a teneraliz€d sense, losing its specific r€ferent dnd eventually

I pointint to an dbstracted othemess that describ€s th€ possessor. Nel-'

son Craburn, writing on "fourlh world arts," has suggested:

As "civilized scieties" come to dcpend more md more uponstandardized mass'produced artifacts, the distinctiv€ness of classs,Iamilies, and individuals disappears, and the importation of forei8nexohc arts incrcases to meet the demand for distinctiven6s. especiallyfor the snob or status market. One gains prestige by association withthese obi(ts, wh.ther they are souvenirs or expensive imPorls; there isa cachet connectcd rith international travel, exploration,multi.ulturalism, elc. that lhese arts symtolize; at the same time, thereis the nostalgi€ input of the ftard"rdde in a "plastic world."te

iThus such obiects satisfy lhe nostalSic desire for use value at the same

, time that they provide an exoticism of the s€lf. Ironically, the demandJfor such objects creates a souvenir market of Soods distinct fromauthentic traditional crafts, that is, crafts desiSned in liSht of usevalue. And these souvenir goods are often characterized by new tech-niques of mass prcduction. There is thus a direcily proportional rela_

^ tionship between the availability of the exotic experience and the_ availability of "exotic objects." Once the exotic experience is readilypurchasable by a large segment of the tourist population, either moreand more exotic expedences are sought (consider travel Posters ad-vertising the last frontier or the last uJlspoil€d island) ot in a tyF ofrcvtrse snobb-ery, there is a turnint toward "the classis'l of th€ con-sumer's native culture. In those cities where one finds a wide range of"ethnic" restaurants frequenled by those not of the same ethnicity,

t49 OBIEC.S OF DES|RE

on€.is also likely to find rcstaunnts advertisint ,,classic Americancuisine," a phrase which itself cannot work withlut a French deela_zrn8.

. Eo! the inyrtriioD-olt!€*lgicobies!_te take place, therc must first9e_separation. It must be ctear that the object--EfiianEed fiorn rhecontext in which it will be displayed as a souvenir; it must be clearthat use value is s€parate &om display value.ro There is perhaps nobetter exampleof this process than the rad rca I gene ra tion ai sepa;ationIn America which results in (ertain nostalgic forms of lawn a;t. Whilewe se€ the exotic and the cultural other explored in forms such aspink flamingos and slumbering Mexicans, the most common formsare,anhquarian ones such as wagon wheels, donley carts, sleighs,and oxen yokes. Thes€ metonymic forms are lhe articuldtion of a6an.clon€d use value. Prominently displayed, they speak to the industri.ll_rzahon or the occupants of th€ hous€, occupants who have becometourists of their parents, ways of life.

Yet to create "tourist art,, is to create display value from the outsetand to by-pass this traduai transformad;n.' Separdtion is accom-plrshed spatia y rather than temporaly here. Thus it is necessary tornvenr the p?sloral and- the primitive through an illLrsion of a hotisticand rnlegrated cultural other. As for tourist souvenirs themselves;they increasintly tend in both form and content to be shaped by thelexPeclahons of the tourist market that will consume them. Graburnpoints out that since make6 of souvenirs must compete with import,ed, manufactured souvenirs, native arts tend toward smaller sizes_not simply small souveniF, but miniatures of traditional artifacts, asw€ saw in the basket-maker er.ample earlier. AmonB the advantaeesot minraturized arricles are ,,applicabijity for de€orati;e use, econ;vol firalenals, anda doll-like, folkloristic quality not associated witirthe real artide "2r Those quatiries of rhe objeit which lint ir mostcrcsery to tts tunction in nahve context are emptied and reDlaced bvboth display vatue and the symbolic system of th".on.u^"i. Wittiuribas(om has found that in African art this tourist innuence has re_sulled in three stylistic trends, all arisint out of Westem aestheticpr|noples. first, there is a tendency toward Westem ideas of natural_lsm and realism; traditional modes of styliztion were replaced bvrunetf'enth<entury. Europ€.n conventions of the picturesque. sec_ond, bere is a tendenry toward an opposite extreme: the grotesque,ttascom condud€s that this work ,,may reflect both Europein precon.ceptons about the savagery orstrendh ofAfrican sculpture a; wellasrhe Intluence o[ G€rman Expressionism on European artistic taste.,,rne rmrd lendency is toward giganti6cation. yoruba (arvers, for €x_ample, reproduce be[s or clappers used in lfd divination_bells that

1 5 0 O N L O N C I N G

are nonnally 8-16 inches long and 1 inch in diameter-in versionsthat are 3 feet lonS and 3 inches in diameter. Gigantification allowsthe maker to charte more for his product, yet at the F€me time mayinvolve less labo. b€cause it requires less attention to detail.2 Sfurilar-ly, Grabum writes that "Eskimo soaPstone sculPtors and Cordovasrrlrros calculale that far less tim€ and effort is sPent making larte,

.exp€nsive cdrvin8s lhan the morc typical small ones."E Thus lle

t lourist aesthehc ensures that lhe obied is continually exobcized and

I estranged. And, ironically, obiecls that are oriSinaly valued by tour-I ists preciselv because of their connections lo a ttaditional, holistic,

I and paradisil culture are hansformed, eMsterated, and modifed by,l the fluctuating demands of that same tourist market.i In the uses of the souvenir, the other side of separation is rcstora-

tion-here the false promise of testoration. The souvenir must beremoved from its context in order to serye as a trace of it, but it mustalso be restored through narrative and/or reverie. Whal il is restor€dto is not an "authenLic," thdt is, a native, context-of oridn but animasinary (ontext oi onqln whose cnlei suDlect 15 a proFcDon or me

I p6iiessors crrilahirod.-Resro'ition ran.EGEi-asir*pqn*-E anJ' insatisfactory set of present (onditions. Just as the restoration of

uiiainCs, ofiei tak;iphce riiihin-programs of "gentrification" incontemporary cities, has as its basis the restoration of class relation-ships lhat might otherwise be in flux, so the restotahon of the sou-venir is a conservdtive idealization ofaE;pa=;iaflFGllis-Eiaflorrh? purtroses of-{Fi€tenTldeologv. WaFuS mldht say thal a[ sou-'venirs fEsouvEh]i66T; n;[ure which has been invented by ideology.

,l\ This conclusion speaks not only to the disPlay of Victorian sea shells.

-_under glass but also lo lhe broader tendency to Place all lhints natu-'/ ral at o e degree of removal from the present flow of events and\ therebv to obiectifv them.,l)-

'tne' ontf]'iop..c context for the souvenir is the displacement otrevede, the gap betwe€n origin/object/subject which fields desire.Wher€as the collection is either truly hidden or Plominendy dis-played, the souvenir, so long as it remains "uncoUect€d," is "lost"rcmoved from any context o{ origin and use value in such a way as to"surprise" and capture its viewer into reverie. The actual locale of thesouvenir is often comm€nsurate with its malerial worthlessness: theattic and lhe cellar, contexts away from the business and entagementof everyday life. Other rooms of a house arc tied to function (kitchen,bath) and presentation (parlor, ha[) in such a way that they existwithin the temporality of ev€ryday life, but the attic and the cellar aretied to the temporality of the past, and they scramble the Past into asimultaneous order which memory is invited to reanante: heaven

I5l OBl€CrS OF DEsrR[

and hell; tool and ornament, ancestor and heit, decay and prcserva-tion. The souvenir is destined to be fortotten; its tragedy lies in th€death of memory, the traSedy of all autobiography and the simul-taneous ensure of the auto&aph. And thus we come again to thepowerful metaphor of the unmarked grave, the reunion with themother with no corresponding reteneration of the syrnbolic.

Pan u. TllE COLLECTION, PARADI OT CONSUUnTN

Context Deslroye.l

The souvenir involves the displacement of attention into th€ past.The souvenir is not simply an object app€aring out of context, anobiect from lhe pasl incongruously survivrnB in the present;g!bf!ils function is to envelop the-prese€l wilhin lhe past. Souveiirs aremtgir€ft6ieciaE-ause of this transformation. Yel the magic of thesouvenir is a kind of failed rhagic. Instrumentality replaces essencehere as it does in the case of all magical obiects, but this instrumen-tality always works an only partial transformation. The place of oritinBrrst remain unavailable in order for desire to be ginerdted:

All souvenirs are souvenirs of nature, yet it is nafure in its mostsynthetic, its most acculturated, sens€ which appears here. Nature isananted diachronically through the souvenir; its synchrony andatemporality are manipulated into a human time and order. Thepressed flowers under tlass speak to the significance oI their ownerin nature and not to themselves in natur€. Thev arc a samDle of alarger and more sublime nature, d nahrre diffe;enfialed by'humanexpeience, by human history.

ln contrast to the souvenir, the collection offers example rather Ithan sample, metdphor rath€r than meronymy.

'l he collection does I

not displace attention to the past; rather, the past is at the service of \the colection, for whereas the souvenirlends duthenticity to lhe past, \the past lends aolhenticity to lhe collection. The rouecrion s€eks a \form of self-enclosure whi(h is possible because of its ahistoricism. \The collection replaces history with ckssif.rriryr, with order beyond Ithe realm of temporality. In the collection, time is not something to be A 'r€stored to an origin; rather, all time is mad€ simultaneous or syn-t' jchronous within the collection's world. :

The muvenir still trears a trace of us€ value in its instrumentalitv. 1but the collection represenls the total aestheti.i"atjon of use valui.lThe collection is a form of art as play, a form involving the reframingof objects within a world of attention and manipulation of context,

\iIII

1 5 2 O N L O N G I N C

I Like other forms of arl, its function is not th€ restorirtion of context oforidn but rather the creation of a new context, a context standint in am€taphorical, rather than a contituous, relation to the world ofeveryday life. Yet unlike many forms of art, the collection is notrepresentational. The collection Presents a hermetic world: to have areDresentative collection is to have both the minimum and the com_plete number of elements necessary fol an autonomous wo.ld----aworld whjch is both full and singular, which has banished rePetitionand achjeved autho tY.

We mitht therefore say, beSSing forgiveness, that the archetyPalcollection is Noah's Ark, a world which is rePresentative yet whicherases its context of oritin. fhe world of the ark is a world not ofnostal8ia but of anhcipation. While th-e ;rth-t'iAG redUnda-n les-areaeskoytd; the coUG?fton mein-ntains its integrity and boundary' Oncetffiject is ctmpl;iay severed from its or;gin, it is Possible to SeneFate a new series, to start atain within a context that is framed by theselectivity of the collector "And of every living thing ofall flesh, youshatl bring two of every sort into the atk, to keeP them alive with you;they shall be male and female. Of the birds accordint to their kinds,and of the animals accordinS to their kinds, of every creePing thing ofthe ground according to its kind, two of every sort $hall come in toyou, to ke€p them alive. Also take with you every sort of food that iseaten, and store it upi and it shall serve as food lor you and forth€m." The world ofthe ark is dependent upon a Prior creation: Noahhas not invent€d a world, he is simply Cod's brok€r' what he rescuesfrom oblivion is the two that is one Plus one, the two that can 8€ner_te seriality and infinity by the symmetrical joining of asymmetry.hile the point of the souvenir may be rememberinS, or at least the

nvention of memory. the Point of the collection is forgetting-start-nt again in such a way that a finite number of elements cteate, by/irtueof their combination, an infinite reverie. Whose labor made therk is not the question: the question is whal is inside.

This difference in purpose is the reason why th€ scraPbook and thememory quilt musl properly be seen as souvenirs ralher tian ascollecti;ns.)4 In appr;hending such obiicts, we-fiid that the wholedissolves into parts, each of which refe6 metonymically to a context ofdrigin or acquisitioi:T6'is is lhe eiperierice ot obiects-into-nanativesthat w€ saw in the animation of the toy and that becomes, in fact, the"animating" principle of works su€h as xavier de Maistre's yolo8e

Autow de Ma Chafibrc: "Mais il est aussi imPossible d'exPliquer claire_ment un tableau que de faire un Portrait ress€mblanl d'aPras unedescription."6 In mntrast. each element within the collection is representative and works in combination toward the creation of a new

whole that is the cutext of the coll€ctioait5elf. The spatial whole of thecol€ctjon supersedes the individuat nanarivei-iha-r i,li;&iiind it.- tn[rrAtrcta. ortlhea.sthetica of Bri$sh merantilism, lames H. Bunnsuggests that "in a curio cabinet each cultural remnant has a circum_scriH allusiveness amont a collection ofothers. Ifthe unintentionalaesthetic of accumulating erohc goods materidlized as a side effect ofmercantilism, it c?n be semiolotically considered as a special case ofeclecticism, which

-intentionatly itnores proprieties of ;aHve historyand topoFaphy."r6 The aestherics of mercdntilism, which Bun;places within the period of1688-1763, is thus in an important wav theantithesis of the-.esthetics of antiquarianism. The anriquan;n ismoved by a nostalFa oforitin and presence; his lunclion is to validaleiheculture oftround, as we see in works such as Camden,s Iritarn,o.

. Bul the mercanlilist is not moved by restorationj he is moved byextractionand seriality. He removes theobiect from conte\t and Dlace;it within theplay oJ signifiersthat characterize dn ex(hange eco;omy.

153 oaIEcTs oa D€slR€

Because l}re collection replaces origin with classificattn, there6makint temporality a spatial and material phenomenon, its e)\istencAl s deElendent uDon D. in . i6 lp< . f . rd rn i , ) r i ^ - , ^ r - , r ^^^ : - - . : ^ - ^ - lrs dependent upon principles of organization and categorization. AsBaudrillard has suggested, it is necessary to distineuisi between rhJBaudrillard has sutgested, it is necessary to distinguisi between thconcept oI collection and that of accumulationr ,,Le-stade inf€rieur estcelui de 1'accumulation de matiCres: entass€ment de vieux papierc,stockate de nourriture-i mi{hemin entre l,introiection orale et lar€lention anale-puis l'accumulation s€rielle d,obiets identioues. Lacollection, elle, dmerge vers la culture . . . sans cesler de renv;ver lesuns aux autres, ils incluent dans c€ ieu une ext6riorite sociale, destelations humaines."27 Herein lies the dilference between the collec_tions of humans and the collections of pack rats. William James re,ported _thai a California wood rat aranges nails in a symmetrical,fortresslike pattern arcund his nest, bui the obiects ,,iollected,,_silver, tobacco, watches, tools, knives, matches, pieces of glass_nrewithout seriality, without relation to one anothe; or to a ;onrcxt ofacquisition. Such accu4qbllgljaotviousty not connected ro the cul_ture and-the economy il rhg lgr-ne wiy that the collection proper iscoyell. ed. to such strudures.Atthou8h the obiects of a hobbyist,scollection have significance only in relarion to one another and to theseriJly that such a relation implies, the objects collected by the woodrat are intrinsic objects_ objects complete in themselves beciuse of thesensory qualiries that have rnade,lhe.Da attractive to the rat. lam€sfound the sam€ propensity for collectint intrihsic obtects among"misers" in lunatic asylums: ,, ,the miser, par e.rceiience of the populaiimagination and of melodrama, the monster of squalor and_mis_anlhropy, is simply one of rhese menra y deranged persons. His

l : '4 ON LONcI Nc

intellect may in many matters be cleat but his instincts, esPeciallythat of ownership, arc insane, and their insanity has no mor€ to dowith the associati()n of ideas than with th€ Precession of the equinox-.es."23 Thus lames concludes that hoarders hav€ an uncontollable

limpulse b take and keeP. Here we mi8ht add that this form of in-

lsanity is, like anal retentiveness, an ulge toward incorporation for its

Iown sake, an attempt to erase the limits ofthebodythatis atthesamejtime an att€mpt, marked by desperation, to "keeP body and sotilrtosether."'

Although it is clear that there is a corresPondence betiveen theproductions of art and the Productions of insanity in th€se cases, it isequatly clear that the rniser's collectjon dePends upon a refusal ofdifferentiation whil€ the hobbyjst's collection dePends upon an ac-(eptance of differentiation as its very basis for €xistence. Thus the"proper" collection will always take Part in an anticiPation of re-demptionr for example, the eventual coining-in of obiects or theeventual acquisition of obiect status by coins themselves- But theinsane collection is a collection for itsown sake and for its own move-ment. It refuses the very svstc,'' of obiects and thus meton''micallyrefuses the entire political economy that serves as the foundation forthat system and the only domain within which the system acquiresmeaning. Baudrillard as well concludes that becaus€ of the col€c-tion's seriality, a "formal" interesl always replaces a "real" int€r€st incollected obiects.'?e This reolacement holds to the extent that aestheticvalue replac€s use value. But such an aesth€tic value is so clearly tiedto the cultural (i.e., defermcnt, redemption, exchar,Se) that its valu€syatem ls the value system of the cultural; the formalism ofthe collec-tion is never an "empty" formalism.

Iftside an.l outsiile

To ask which principles of orSanization are us€d in articulaling thecollection is to begin to discern what the collection is about. It i5 notsufficient to say that the collection is or8anized according to time,space, or internat qualities of the objects themsclves, for each ofth€separameters is divided in a dialectic of inside and outside, Public andprivate, meanint and exchanSe value. To arrante the obiects accord-ing to time is to juxtaPose Personal time with social tim€, autobiogra-phy with history, and thus to create a fiction of the individual life, atime of the individual subiect boih transcendent to and Para el tohistorical time. Similarly, the spatial organization oI the collection,Ieft to right, front to back, behind and beforc, depends uPon thecreation of an individual perceiving and aPPrehending th€ collectron

155 O8lECTs Of DfsrRE

with eye and hand. The collection's space must move b€tween thepublic and the private, b€tw€en disptay and hidint. Thus the minia-ture is suitabie as an item of collection becaus€ it is sized for indi-vidual consumption at the same time that its surplus of detail con,notes infinity and distance. While we can "see" the entire collection,wecannot possibly "s€e" each ofitselements. We therebyalso find atwork here the play between idenriry dnd difference whiih chara.rer-izes the collection organized in accordance with qu.lities df th€ ob-jects themselves.'To grou? qb-iqc-tq i! a series bec,use they are l,thesame" is to simultaneously signify th€ir difference. In the co ection,the more the objecls dr; similar, the more imperarive it rs that wemake gestures to distinguish them. As an example of this obs€ssionwith series, consider Pepys's library:

Samuel Pepys, who ananged and rea.ranged his library, Iina yclassihed his b@ks a€cording to size. In double rows on rhe shetves rhclarger volun€s werc placed behind the smaller so thar thc tcrtoins on.llcould be seen; and in order rhdr rho rops might bc even wrrtr cictrolher. this near (oll€ctor builr wooden srilrs where nccc\sary rnd,pla.ing those under the shorter books, gilded rhcrn ro march thebindings! Subject and ref€renceconvenience were secondarv in rhisananSement, €xcepl insofar as the ecrosancr diary was concem€d, andthis, which had b€en writt.n in norebooks of varyin8 size, M.. pepys,Eve.ting to reaen, had bound uniformly so rhat irs parrs might bekept together without disturbing rhe library's Senerat arnnSemenr-

Pepys's collection must be displayed as an identical series (the stiltarrangement) and as a set of individual volumes (',so that the letier-in8 on all could be seen"). The n€cessity of identiry at th€ e\pense ofInlorm?hon here is an eximple oLBaudrillard's suggestion that for-malr ere$r€pra€€s rcatTrfer€st, lhat this is otten th€ motivation ofthe bibliophne is also made clear by the buying of ,,books,, that areioined cardboard bindings decorated to look like matched sets of Ivolumes, yet in fact are empty.

The colledion is not constructed by its elementsj rather, it comes lo Ier ist by means of i ts pr in( iple of ortanizat ion. t f thal pnnciple is Ibounded at the onset of the collection, the collection wilt be fini1e, orat least potentialy finite. If that principle tends toward infinity orseries itself, the collection will b€ open-ended. As an example of thefirst type, William Carew Hazlitt's suggestions for the coin coll€ctorhold:

There are colleclors who make rheir choice and srand by ; otherswho (olled dillerent series al d'flercnr tim€si orhers whose schcme is

1 5 6 O N L O N G I N C

mis.ellan€ols or desuttorv. To all these classes in.reased facility forjudSing within a convenient compass wtut .onstitutes a series, its

chr;nology, its f.atures, its difficulties, ought to be acc€Ptable To

master eten thc prominenl monograPhs is a task which is sufficient to

dcter all but the most earn€st and indefatig.ble enthusiasts: and, as

usual, no doubt, collections are made on a PrinciPle more or less loose

and vague. At any rate, the first steP should be, we aPPrehend, to

reconn;ihe the Eround, and measure the sPace lo be traversed, with

lhe approximate cost.31

As an example of the second tyPe, consider C. Montieso/s su8-

gesiion that children collect clergymen's names: "There were the

ioloured clergy-Green, Black, \ /hite, Gmy, etc. The haPpy clergy,in the state of-Bliss, Peace, Joy, etc. Th€ vittuous clergy-Virtue,Goodenough, wise, etc. The poor clerty, who Possessed only a-Penny, Farthing, Ha'Penny The moneyed cler8y; these werc-Rich,Money, etc. The bad cl€rgy-Shy, Cunnint, etc "32 Her€ we mitht

also remember Walt€r Beniamin's Project of collectint quotations, a

collection which would ilustrate the infinite and r€generative se-riality of languate itself.

A;y intrin.ic aonnecfion between lhe PrinciPle of or8anization andthe el;ments themselves is minimized bv the collection We see Iittledifference between colections of stones or butterflies and collections

, of coin\ or <tamps. ln d(quinng obiecls, lhe collector rePlaces Produc-t hon with consumption, ob;ect ' are naturdl i red into the landscaPe ofI the collecrion rtseli. I herelore, slones dnd bulterflies are made cultuF

I al by classification, and coins and stamPs ar€ naturalized by the era-

l. sure of labor and the erasure ofcontext ofProduction. This impuls€ to

I remove obiects from their contexts of ori8in and Production and to' ' replace

lho\e conter ls wrth the conter l of the col lect ion is gui te evidenl in Lhe oractjce. ol FloYd E. Nichols of Nelt Yorl Ciry, a co €c-

to/s colector. Rather than exhibit his many co,lected items accordingto type, Nichols would group objects together so that they told aston. "For instance, with miniature cat, mice, whiskey tlass, andwhi;key bottl€, he dramatizes the Proverb,

'One drink of moonshinewhiskey would make a mouse sPit in a cat's face,"'and "To minia_

ture camels he attach€d a number 5 needle, the wire being shaPed sothat when it was pulled away from the n€edle, the camel mounted on

I the tmverse section of the wire passed comPletely through the eye of

I the needle." l l NI.hols s pract ice e\empl i f ies lhe rePlacement of lhe

narrati!e of Drodu(tion bv the narrative of the colle(tion, the rePldre-. ment of the narrative of-history witn the narrative of the individuat

I subj€ct-that is, the collector himselfWhercas the space of th€ souvenir is the body (talisman), the Pe-

157 oBIEC'rS OF DESTRE

riphery (memory), or the contradiction of private display (reverie), ,the space of the collection is a complex interplay of exposure andhidint, organization and the chaos of in6nity. The collection rcliesupon the boy, lhe cabinet, the cupboard, rhe seriality of shelves. lt isldetermined by these boundaries, just as the self is invited Lo expandlwithh the con6nes ofbou€eois domesri( space. For the environmen{1to be an extension of the self, it is ne(essary nol to a(t upon andltrdnsform it, but to declare its €ssential emptin€ss by filling it. Omar Iment d€cor, and ultimately decorum define the boundaries of private \space by emptyinS that space of any relevance other rhan rhai of rhe Isubied. In a suSgestive essay on the etymotoSy of rhe terms nrtrca )a d ambience, Leospitzer traces the notion of authentic place as mov-ing hom the cldssical macrocosmic,mi(rocosmir relaiion betweenman and nature, in which space is climate, protector, and effectintpresence; to the medieval theory of tradations, in which social position becomes the natural place of beingj to the late-seventeenth-cen-tury notion of the interior: "It is in such descriptions of an interiorseKint thal the ided of the 'milieu' (enclosing and ,filled in') is presented mosl (orcefully; we have the immedote miiieu of the indi-vidual. One may remember the vogu€ which paintin$ of the sametype enjoyed in the preceding c€ntury-int€d€urs depicting the coziness and comfort of well-tumished human dw€Uings. . . . The world- \embracinS, metaphysi(al, cupold that once enfotded manlind has \disappedrd, and mdn is lefi lo rattle around in an inJrnjte universe. iThus he s€eks all the more lo ftll in his immediate, hrs physical, /

'

env onment with things."Y IlI this tasl of filtin8 in the immediate environment wirh things

were simply one of us€ value, itwouldb€ quite simple. Burthis filling ^in is a matter of omamentation and presentation in which the interior :/is both a model and a projection oI self{ashionint. The contradictionsof the aesthetic canon are contradictions of genealogy and person-ality: harmony and disruption, sequenc€ and combinarion, patternand variation. Consider Grace Vallois's €xtensive advice in Filst Siersin Collecting Fu itule, Class, and Chika:

There is to me som€thing distinclly incongruous in seeing a larg€ Welshdresser (never originally neant for anything but a kftchen) occupyingthe entire wall of a little j€rry-built twentielh century dining room, andadom€d with the neessary adjuncts of everyday lif€, biscuit boxesperhaps, and a Tantalus stand. Somehnes the dresser is promoted tothe 'drawing room' so called, and thrusts its grand, simple old lin€s,among pahs in pots, an ugly but convenient Suth€rland table for tea,or crowninS ahocity, one of those three-tiered srands for cak€ andbRad and butte.. These things may be conv€nient, bur rhey do nor go

with the old drcsserl - lt is nol necessary to have eerylhing of th€

same rEriod, thrt, ro my mind, is dull and uninleresting- An ancestral

home is nccessarily buili uP bit by bit, each Seneration has added

somclhinc and k'fi their impress in the old house l lite lo se lacob€ancharh liv;nc dmicdbly with Sheraton cabinets, and old fou Posbershdrins ooi;r spncc with lTth cenlury Bndal .hesls, and lElh century

HeDDl;whitc chairt. Thal it as it ,hould be, and aPPeals lo me far more

th;a pcrf€ct 18th century hous€, where everything inside and out

seems to sPeak of Adam 3s

lroni(allv, Booth Tarkjngton's parody of colleclors in Thz Coll(Ior's

Wrrinol contains a similar essay by one "Antustula Thomas" on

"pooning," or arrangint, the (ollection. AnEustula advises: "Don't

aitrere tio closelv to periods. If you have acquired t few Sood Piecesof Eevptian furniture of the Shepherd King Period for your livint-

."o.i. ift"u ^"v be easilv combined with Sheraton or Eastlake by

olacine a Minge vase or an old French fowlinS-Piece beLween the two

!.o,joi' o. uoi -"v .over the transition by ' Lithl s{atterint of Mex'

ican porrery, or soine Java wine-iars."$ Thes€ terts, either 'tincere"

or oarodvine, imply that possession cannot be undenaKen hoep€n-

d;r"i."Gtbdd-ttart"l"ent Each sign is Plac€d in relatiln- to a

. chain of siSnifiers whos€ ultimate referent is not the int€nor ot theu

room -in i"tself an emptv essence-but ihi inlerior of the self'

ln ord-er to consrrucrlhis narrative of inleriority it is necessary to/ obliterate the object's context of oritin. In these examPles edecticism

rather than pure seriality is to be admired because, if for no other

redson, it m;rks the heierogeneous ortanization of lhe s€lt, a s€lf

caoable of transcending the a(cidents and disP€rsions of hisbncal

,elliw. But eclecticism it the same time depends uPon the unstated'i seriaiitv it has bounded from. Not simply a consumer of the obiecls

i tfrut titi tt'" d6cor, the self generates a fantasy in which it becomes

\ oroducer of those obiects, a;roducer by arrantemenl and maniPula-t iion. tt'" ralher exiraordin;ry confidence wilh which Vallois ad-'

dresses her audience, which is assumed to have access to the "con-

trolled varietv" of seventeenth- and eiEhteenth-century antiques

that she "likes to see," is the confidence of the managerial classes,

whose own role in the Production of history is dePendent uPon the

luxurv of the collection of surplus value Here w€ might consider the

structural meaninq of the "flia" market as dePendent uPon the lei

surc tastes and discarded fashions of the host culture: the market

economy. Similarly, Balzac's ori8inal title for his nov€l of 'ollectint'

1 5 8 0 N L O N C T N C

Cousin Fons, was b Parasile. As we know from the antics of that Poorrelation, the economy of collecting is a fantastic one, an economy

n'ith its own principies of exchange, substitution, and rePlicability

159 oBlacls oa DESTRE

despite its d€pendence upon the larger economic system. Balzac,s Inarrator tells us: "Theioy of buyintbric-i-brac is a secondary detight;'in the dve-and-take oI barter lies the joy ofjoys."37 The term a-bric-a-Itrrr, which we might translate as "by hook or crook," implies theprocess of acquisition and exchange, which is the (false) Iabor of thecollector. Her€in lies the ircnic nostalgia of the collection's economicsystem: althouth dependent upon, and a mirrorint of, the largereconomy of surplus value, this smal ler e(onomy is sel f-suff i ( ient and ̂sel f-general inS wi lh retard to i ts own mednings and pnncrptes o(r.exchange. Whereas the larter economy has replaced use valuethrough the translation of labor into exchange value, the economy ofthe colle<tion trdnslales the monetary system into thc system of ob. _iects. Indeed, that system of obiects is ofren dr.signed ro serve ns .r /slay dtainst lhe frdilties of lhe very monetary system frum whi(h ir ,lhas sprung. The collection thereby acquires an aura of transcendence lJ

:::jl1"J::*:::,,,::r is symptomaric of the middre crass.s varues/[

reSardinS persondlity.When one wants to dispamge the souvenir, one says that it is not

authentic; when one wants to disparage the collected obiect, one says"it is not yo!." Thus Spitz€r's model of the self as occupying theinterior in conjunction with obiects is not a completely adequate one,for thecontained here is the self; the material body is simply one moreposition within the s€rialitv and div€rsity of objects. Private space ismarked by an exterior mat€rial boundary and an interior surplus ofsienification.

To play with series is to play with the fire of infinity. In the collec-tion the threatofinfinity is always met with the articularion ofbound-ary. Simultaneous sets are worked a8ainst each other in the same waythat attention to the individual object and att€ntion to the whole areworked against €ach other. The collection thus appears as a mode ofcontrol and containment insofat as it is a mode of seneration andseri€s. And this lunct ion of contdinment must be tak;n inro account Ias much as any simple Freudian model when we note the treat popu-larity of collecting obiects that are themselves containers: cruets, lJpilchers, salt-and-pepper shakers, vases, teapots, and boxe, to name Ia few. The 6nite boundaries these obiects afford are played against Ithe infinite possibility of their collection, and. analogously, their finiteuse value when filled is played atainst the measureless emptinesslhat marks their new aesthetic function.

tn other cases, catetorization allows lhe collection to be finite- l/indeed. this finitude becomes the collecto/s obsession. The Ne&-r Yorl ITitnes for March 15, 1980, carried an account of a man who was (andprobably still is) searching for three antique Tiffany postal scates; he

1 6 0 O N L O N C I N C

owns six of the nine that are said to exist and has Daid a specialfindint service to look for the missinS trio of scal€s. Wiliam Walsh'sHandy-book of Litcnry C!/iositr',qs recounts a compatable story:

Therc is a story of a wealthy EnSlish colleclor who long b€lieved that ac.{tnin rare book in his possession was a unique. One day h€ r€ceiveda bitter blow. He learned that there was another copy in Pans. But hesoon rallied, and, crossing over the Chann€I, he mad€ his way to therival's home. "You hav€ such and such a book in you. library?" heasked, plunain8 at once ir nedias rcs. "yes." 'nve[, I want to buy it.""But, my ded si! " "l wi[ give you a thousand francs for it-" '3ut itisn'l fo! salq I-" "Two lhousand!" "On my word, I don't care todispoG€ of it." 'Ten lhousandl" and so on, till at last twenty-fivethousand fiancs was offered, and the Pdisian gentleman finalyconsented to pa.t with this treasure. The Englishman counted outtwenty-five thousand-franc bills, examined the purchase caretully,smiled with satisfaction, and cast the book into the fire. "Are youcrazy?" oied the Parisian, stooping over to rescue it. "Nay," said theEnSlishman, detaining his arm. "l am quite in my nght mind. I, t@,possess a copy of that book. I deemed it a mique."38

This story is. by now, a letend of colecting (Eaudrillard, via MauriceRheims, recounts it as happenint in New York).3e lt is an account olthe replacement of content with classification, an alcount of the waysin which couection is the antithesis of qea€on. inlii sea-rcn-fo-r a

F€dE rT€nBrt@r*+{,3l]lE@Ethlabbi ".a

ni"t*ry. Th€ bibliomaniac's desire for the possession of the unique object issimilarly reflected in th€ collectols obsession wiih thE;beiir6on.D'Israeli records that Cicero wrote thus to Atticut iequddnB-nth-dtpin formint a collection of antiquities: "In the name of our friendshipsuffer nothing to escape you of whatever you find curious or lare."s

The collector can gain control over repetition or series by defining a

v finite set (the Tiffany postal scales) or by possessing the unique otsject. The latter object has acquired a particular poitnancy since theonset of mechanical reprcduction; the aberrant or unique objecr sit-nifies the llaw in the machine iust as the machine once sitnifi€d th€llaws ofhandmade production. veblen's critique of conspicr.rous con-sumption sunilarly concluded that the handmade objecys cruditywas, ironically, a symptom of conspicuous waste. "Hand labor i5 amore wasteful method of production; hence the goods turned out bythis method are rnore seryiceable for the pulpose of pecuniary repu-tability; hence the marks of hand labor come to be honorific, and the

toods which exhibit these marks take rank as of hiSher grade lhan thecorresponding machine product. . . . The appreciation of those evi-dences of honorific crudeness to which hand-wrought Boods owetheir superior worth and charm in the eyes of well-bred people is a

16l osrEcIS Of DES,R€

matter of nice discrimination."4r Thus a measured crudity of materialquafity is prcs€nted in tension with an overefinement of sitnificance.This tension is turther exatterated by the ,uxtaposition of the uniqueand sinFlar qualities of the individual object against the serialty ofthe collection as a whole.

The collection isoften about containment on the level ofits contentand on the level of the series, but it is also about containment in amore abstract sense. Like Noah's Ark, those geat civic collections,lhe libmry and the museum, s€ek to represent experienCe {.i!6jn amode of control and confinement.,One cannot know everythintabout the world, but one can at G-ast approach closed knowledgithrough the coUection. Although transcendent and compr€hensive inr_agard fo .ts own context, such knowledge is both ecleciic and eccen-tric. Thus the ahistoricism of such knowledge makes it particularisticand consequentlJ random. ln writin8s on collecting, one constdntlyfiniliilisiuision oi-the colle$ion as a"mode of knowtedee. Alice Vanl,eer Carrick declares in the preface to Collpclor's Lark thit "collectingisn't just a fad; it isn't even ,ust a 'divine madness'r properly in-terpreted, it is a liberal education."4 Indeed. one might say invercelythat the tib€ral arts education characteristic of the leisure classes is initsef a mode of collection. The notion of the "educational hobby'.legitimates the collecto/s need for control and poss€ssion within aworld of infinitely consumable obiects whose production and con-sumption are far beyond the ken of the individual subiect. Althouththe library might be seen in a semiotic sense as representint theworl4 this is not lhe collecto/s view; for the collector the library is arepresentative collection of books iust e15 any collectioriii represen=tzphn6;fiGaaB-f obiecBiThEsjor rh! colRctoL the maEd;L+&Jtyoi theTooFis foreei;undgd a t"uE-re pa.oaiea ty OruyC.e, ,,Oi.u.it

a collector, as soon as I enter his house, I am Ieady to faint on thestainase, ftom a stront smell of Morocco leather; in vain he shows mefine editions, gold leaves. Etruscan bindings, and naming them oneafter another, as if he were showing a tallery of picturcs! . . . t thankhim for his politeness, and aS little as hims€lf care to visit the tan-house, which he calls his library-"s

Yet it is the museum, not the library, which must serve as the€entral m€taphor of the collection; it is the museum, in its represen-tativeness, which strives for authenticity and for closure of all spaceand temporality within the context at hand. In an essay on Bo ualdand Pacuchet, Eugenio Donato has written:

The s€t of objects the Museum displays is sustained only by the fctionthat they somehow constitute a coherent represenlational univelse. Thefiction is that a repeated m€tonymic displacement of tragment for

1 6 2 O N L O N G I N C

totality, object 10 labcl, series of obiects to senes of labels, can stillproduce a rcprcscntation which is sonchow adequate to a nonlinguisticuniverse. Such a fiction is the result of an uncritical belief in th€ notionthat orderin8 and chssifyinS, lhat is to say, the sPatial ju,(iaPosition ofIragmcnls, can p()duce a representational understanding of the

Thus there are two movements to the collection's Sestue of standingfor the worldr first, the metonymic displacement of part for whole,item for context; and second, the invention of a classification schemewhich will define space and time in such a way that the world isaccounted lor by the elements of the collection. We can see that whatmustbe suppressed here is the privileging of conlext of oriFn, for theelements of the collection are, in fact, already accounted for by theworld. And we can consequently s€e the lo&c behind the blithe 8es-ture toward decontextualization in museum acquisitions, a testurewhich rcsults in the treasures of one culture being stored and dis-played in the museums of another. Similarly, the museum of natunlhbtory allows nature to exist "all at once" in a way in which it couldnot otherwise exist. Because of the fiction of such a museum. it i5 theLinnaean system which articulates the identities of plants, for exam-ple, and not the other way around. The popularity of tableau sc€nesin the natural history mus€um and the zoo ftrther speaks to thedramatic impulse toward simultanejty andlhe felicitous reconciljq-- - -+---

"tion ol oDDosites which charactenze such collections.In SFibook on coll€cline, whiah she wraG for children, Montiesor

r€commends that "every h;use ouSht to possess a 'Museum,' €ven iIit is only one shelf in a small cupboard; here, carefully dated andnamed, should be placed the pretty shells you tather on the sea-shore, the old fossils you find in the rocks, th€ sk€leton leaves youpick up from under the hedges, the stmnge orchids you find on thedowns. Learn what you can about each obiect before you put it in themuseum, and docket it not only with its name, but also with thename of the place in which you found it, and the date."a5 Thus wehave directions for the homemade universe; nature is nothing moreor less than that group ofobjects which is articulated by the classifica-tion syst€m at hand, in this case a "personal" one. When objects aredefined in terms of their us€ vaiueJhey g?G?fa*ensiohs-oTThe-bodv

inlo lhe envlonment, but v'/hen obieds are defined bv lhe.ond.bon, su(h an extenslon rs lnverled, sewrng to suDsume lneenvironment to a scen uio-oJ the personal. The ultimate term in-meiE;is

t-nat ma*s the colle.tion is the "self," the drticulalion of lhecollector's own "identity." Yet ironically and by extension, the fetish_ist's impulse toward accumulation and privacy, hoarding and the

163 O8I€Cr5 OF D€SjRE

secret, sqlles both to give inteqritv to the selfand at the same time to

"r,ejlor9'Ii'. ;nEit-h sigdne{tion. .Bunol" n_-'s arri(le on British

rirerciniitist culture, has suggested that this sumlus o[ significancecan, in facl, slltunrle the collector: "Allhough the chani€ removal of acu-ltirrat

-olen ciuteriza Gso,t.ce, it also overwhelms uninten_

tionally the semiological substructure ofits host."e For an examPle ofthis process by which the host is overwhelmed, we miSht rememberthe haunting picture of Mario Praz at the concl'rsion of La Casa dellaVita; gazin, into a convex mirror which reflects a rogln full of col-lected obiects, Praz sees himselfas no bigger than a hdndfulof dust, dmus€um piece-amoig-musdlm Pieces, dela(hed dnd remote

]i@fleq.<n collectionjllq-fetishism is mediat€d bycla$8!g!9la!!k!!qplav in tensiol,lYith accqmulation and secrecy.As W. C. Hazlitt !!tote, "The formation of Collections of Coins oriSi-nated. not in the Numismatist, but in the Hoarder. Individuals, froman early stage in the history of coined money, laid Pieces asid€, as(nearer to our day) Samuet P€pys did, because they were striking ornovel, or secreted them in the ground, like PePys, because th€y werethought to be insecure."aT ln the hoarder the Sesture towaiq an in-comPletelgPbEelsd lllle+cl!-obiq(tFthe gesture we saw al workthrough the substitution ol lbe souvenir for oriSln-becomes a com_p6E-on,-the formation of a repetition or chain of substttuling si8-nifiErs-F6fowinp L€vi-Strauss's work on totems, Baudrillard con-alu6s that the Jesire and Tbaissance characterizing fetishism result.,from the svstematic qualiw of obie(ts rather lhan from the obiects'qrernsehrei-Ce qJi f;s6-ne aans lirgentllort n esi niia riratdrialit6,

Jli meme l'equivalent capt6 d'une certaine force (de travail) ou d'uncertain pouvoir virtu€I, Cest sa sAsltmaticitt; Cest la virtualit€, €n_f€Im€e dans cette matiEre, de substitutivit6 totale de toutes les val_eurs grece a leur abstraction d6finitive "s I! the collection such sys-temafrciw results in the quantification of disire-lDelire is ordered, .ar:nE-i.

-, and m-ani-ptrEG?, iioi faTh6mlel' as ;n the nostalgia of lhe L

s"uu.ffi, tj-".e-w-muFuke into account not only Freuds th"ory oftFe lEtifi but Marx's as we[.

Tlie fetishized obieqlqqqt have a reference Point within the systemo11tre qcttange ica;ody'- €v;n the contemPorary fetishization of thebody in consumer culture is dependent uPon the system of imageswithin which the corporeal body has been transformed into anotherpoint of r€presentation. As.Lscan has noted, the Pleasure of Possess_int arybleelld€p€ldenrlPon-athers.Thlre the abject's Position in afyslem of referents----a syslem we maY simultaneously and variouslychara-a;riz--tfe-psycho;nalytic life history or as the Points of an.ftqggq!!--'"kE the-pla(es of 'txistence"-and not any

1 6 4 O N L O N C I N C

ilgl4q4qqglitles oJ the object or even its context of oridn, determinesits fetishistic valu€ flr( further the olject ts_removed from use valu€,the more.rbstract lt Feaomes and tie rDore multjvocal is ils relqlet-thlit],. The dialectic between hand and eye, possession and tianscen-dence, which motivates the fetish, is dependentupon this abstraction.Thus, iust as we saw that in its oualities of eclecticism and transcen-dence th€ collection can seryeas tmetaphorforthe individual person-ality, so the collection can also serve as a m€taphor for the socr?rirelations ofan exchante €conomy. The collection replicates Marx/sbynow familiar account of the objectification of commodities:

It is a definite social relahon between men, that assumes, in their eyes,the fantastic fom of a r€lation between th'ngs. In order, rherefore, tofind an analogy, we must have recourse to the mist,enveloped regionsof the religious world. In that woild the prcductions ofthe human brainaPpear as independent beings endowed with life, and enrering inrorclat ion both wirh one another dnd rhe human race. So i t is in ihe wortdof.ommodities with the products ofmen's hands. This I catl rheFetishism which attaches itself to the products of labour so soon asthey are produced as commodiries, and which is rherefore inseparabtefrom th€ production of commodities.ae

In this passage we find a description of the proc€ss by which thealienation of labor emerses-l!LejE!gg44q[..!q!9r_p9{9ty4rhin tf ecyde ol e\chin€eJn abslractjon la-tticl E?Les ther^/orl of the bodyperceivable in terms ol its \iSnifying capdgry. This estrangement ofldbor trom rts lo(ation jn lived relations is perceivable in the operdtionof the souvenir as the souvenir both moums and celebrates the gapbetween object and context of oridn. It is, in other words, by means oflhe alien liolr of Iabor that lhe objeciltconstituted. Yei Marx's modelof the pro(ess oafetishizarion tocuses upon the inversion by which theself as producer of meanints is seen a. ihdefende4!of that pr6dic-tion- We must €xtend this description a degree further in order to seethe final stage of this alienation, a stagein vrhich the sellis_fonfutufedby its (onsumption of poods. --

WhA i., th; prooer idbor of the consumerl It is a labor of roralmagic, a fantastic

"l4t'or wlilh qpaates-tlE€uth the manipulation ofabshaction rather than through concrete or matedal means. Thus, inio;ii;sl'lo=1h€14ouvenir, the

"collection presents a metaphor of "pro-

duction" not as "the eamed" but as "the caDtured." The scene oforigin is not a scene of the transformation of;ature; it is too late forthat. Nor is it simply a scene of appropriation, as it might be throuththe exercise of the body upon the world. We to to the souvenir, butthe collection comes to us. The collection says that the world is given;we are inherilors, not producers, of yab€ here. We "luck into" the

155 OErrCrs OF DESTRE

collectionr it might attach itsef to particular scenes of acquisition, butthe intefity of those scenes is subsumed to the transcendent andahistorical context of the collection itself. This context d€strcys the

-

context of origin. In the souvenir, the object is made magical; in thecollection, the mode of production is mad€ magical. ln this belief infortune we see a further erasure oI labor. As Veblen noted in TreThEory of the bisurc Class, "The belief in luck is a sense of fofiuitousnecessity in the sequence of phenomena."ro The souvenir magi(ally j1bansports us to the scene of or i t in, but the col lect ion is magical ly anf l l lserially transported to lhe scene of acquisition, ils proper destinatio4lljAnd this scene of acquisihon is rep€ated over and over through thlIserial arrangemenr of obiects in displdv space. Thu\, collected obiecrslare not the resull of t}|e serial operation of labor upon the material]environment. Rather, they present the seriality of an animate world; Jtheir production appedrs to be seLI motivaLed and self-realized. lf{they are "made," i t is by a pro(€ss that s€ems to invent i tsel f for lhe/pleasure of the acquirer. Once again, an illusion of d relation betweenlthings takes the place of a social relation.

The souvenir reconstitutes the scene of acquisirion as a mergint 1with the other dnd thus promises the preimaginary paradise of the ,lself-as-world even as it must us€ the symbolic, th€ narrative, as a Idevice to arive at that reunion. But the collection tak€s this move- lt\ ,ment even further. tn its erasure of labor, the collection is prelap- | |

r'

sarian. One "finds" theelements ofthe collection muchas the prelap- I /sarian Adam and Eve could find the satisfaction of their needs llwrthoul a necessary articulation of desire. The collector consfrucls a Inarrative of luck which replaces the narrativ€ of production. Thus the | "co ection is not only lar removed from contexts of mat€ial produc-tion; it is also the most abstract of all forms of consumption. And in itstranslation back into the panicular rycle of exchang€ which character-izes the universe of the "collectable," th€ collected object representsquite simply the ultimate sellreferentialty and seriality of money atthe same time that it declares its independence from "mere" money.We might remember that of all invisible workers, those who achrallymake money are the least visible. All colected obj€cts are therebyobiets de l!.r, obj€cts abstracted from use valu€ and materiality within amagic cycle oI self-referential exchange.

This cycle retums us to Eliot's distinction between "old leisure"and "amusement." Crafts arc contiguous to preindustrial modes ofproduction, and thus use value lies at the. cole-o( rheir aestheticforms; andlotously, rhe produ(hon ddmusem€nt inimes the serialityand abslraction of postindusrriil modii of pibduction. For examp)c;one might thinl of square dancing, like bluegrass music, as an imita-

1 6 6 O N L O N G I N G

tion of the organization of mechanical modes of production in itspatterns of seriality, dispersal, and reintegration. Within contempcrary consumer society/ tt'e cpl&elS!_tCleilhC_glac€ af crafts 4q theprevaihng form of dom€stic pastnoe. Ironically, such collecting com-5-mes a preinduslrial aesthetic of the handmade and singular obiectwith a postindustrial mode of acquisition/production: the ready-made.

Metaconsurnption: The Female ImpeEonator

This ironic combination of preindustrial content and postindustrialform is ohly one in a sedes of contradictions under which the collec-tion opelates. We must look more closely at the type of consumedsmthe collection represents. ln presenting a form of aesthetic consump-tion, the collection creates the condjtions for a functional consump-tion; in marking out the space'of the omamentand the superfluous. itdefines a mode of necessity. And yet it is not acceptable to simplypurchase a collection ii toto; the coll€ction must be acquired in a serialmanner. This seriality provides a means fordefining or classifyint thecollection and the collector's life history, and it also p€rmits a-system-atic substitution of purchase for labor. "Eaming" the collection sim-ply involves t roilirg, creating the pauses that afticulate the biogaphyof the collector.

Furthermore, the collection cannot be defined simply in t€rms ofthe worth of its elements. lust as the system of exchange dependsupon th€ relative position ofthe commodity in the chain of signifiers,so the collection as a whole imDlies a valu€-aesthetic or otherwis€-independent of the simple sum of its individual members. We haveemphasized aesthetic value here because a value of manipulationandpositionint, not a value of reference to a context of origin, is at workin the collection. Thus, just as we saw that the material value of thesouvenhwas an eph€m€ral onejuxtaposed with a surplus of value inrelation to the individual lile history, so the ephemeral quality of thecollected obiect can be displaced by the value of relations and sheerquantity. Every coin dissolves into the infinite meaninS of face, thedeepest of surfaces, yet every coin also presents a point of enumera-tion; the accumulation of coins promis€s the amassint oI a cyclicalworld that could replace the world itself. In the face of an apocalypse,Sold and antiques are gathered, iust as we earlier saw Crusoe decid-int to take the money after all.

And on the other side of this scale of values, we must considercollections of ephemera proper {ollections made of disposable itemssuch as beer cans, cast-off clothing, wine bottles, or political buttons.

167 OBIEC'IS OE DLSIRE

Such collections misht seem to b€ anticoll€ctions in th€ir denial of thevalues of the antiou! and the classic as transcendent forms. Yet suchcollections do more than neSate. First, throuSh their accumulationand arrantement they mitht present an aesthetic tableau whi.h nosingle element could sustain. For example, collections ofwine bottlesor cruets placed in a window mark the differentiation of light andspace. ln this way, they, too, mighl function as "intrinsic obiectJ' liketh€ nails and glass fraSments collected by the wood rat. Second,collections of€phemera seru€ to exagllerate certain dominant featuresof the exchange economy: its seriality, novelty, and abstraction. Andby means orby virtue ofsuch exaggeration, they are an ultimate formofconsumerism; they classicize the novel, enabling mode and fashionto extend in both directions-toward the past as well as loward the

Kits€h and camp obiects offer a simultaneous popularizatbn of theantique and antiquation of the fad; they destroy the last frontier ofintrinsicality. Baudrillard has suggested in a brief passag€ on kitsch inLa 9xiit' de co som aliox that kitsch reDresents a saturation of theobject with details.sr Yet this satumtion would be a f€ature of manyvalued obiects, includint both souvenirc and "classic" items for col-lection. Rather, it would be more accura@ to say that the kitsch obiectoffers a saturation of materiality, a saturation_l{bi9h:b-Les place tosuch a deqree that materiality is ironic, splil inlo contrasting voicesl

Pasr anojresenr, mass prooucoon ano rnorvrouai suD,ec(, oD[vron34C-Rilsaiige-5lr&biects lg.laq to subiectify all of consumer cul-ture, lo institute a nostaleia of lhe popuiliFw-hich in fa(t m;kes thepop'I"c. it"giG [i"Aof s'biect. T-itsch-ob;ects u.jnot apirehended'is'tlie

souvenir p;oper is apprehended, that is, on the level of theindividual autobioSraphy, rather, they are appr€hended on the levelof collective identitv. Thev are souvenirs of an era and not of a self.

. - ' -Hence they tend to accumulate?ioirndlFiiTEiodoFrftei3e soi"rrl-ization, adolescence, iust as the souvenir proper accumulates aroundthat period of intense subiectivity, childhood. The seriality of kitschobjects is articulated by the constant self-peiiodizahon of popularculture. Their value depends upon the lluctuations of a self-referen-dal collector's market, just as all collections do. but with the a4dit!a&! co_ls!ai4t_ of Ieslion. Furthermore, whercas obiects such ashand tools had an original use value, the original use value of kitschobiects is an elusive one. Their value in their context of origin wasmost likely their contemporaneousness, their relation to the fluctuat-ing demands of style. Hence kitsch and camp items may be seen asforms of metafashion. Iheir collectid. conslitut€. a ii.cou$e on thecglq!4llreerqatioLof novelllwithin the exchangq ecpnomy. And in

1 6 8 0 N L O N C T N C

their collapsing of the narrow time and deep space ofthe popular intothe deep time and narrow space of the antiques2 they selve an ideol-ogy which would iumble class relations, an ideology which sub-stitutes a labor of perpetual consumption for a labor of production.

The term kilsc,l comes ftom the Cerman /dfscfun, "to put totethersloppily." The kitsch object as coliected obiect thus takes the abstrac-tion from use value a step further. We saw that the collection ofhandmade objects translates the time of manual laboi into the simul-taneity ofconspicuous waste. The desire for the kitsch object as €ith€rsouvenir or collected item marks the complete disinte8ration of mat€-riality through an ironjc display of an overmateriality. The insidebursts its bounds and presents a pure surface of outside. The kitschobject symbolizes not transcendence but emergence in the speed of

I fdshion. Its e),p€nddbitity is the expendability of a consumer 8oods,I their dependence upon novelw as the replacement of use value andI craftsmanshiD.I Carzp is pirhaps a more complex terrn. Thr American Hetitage Dic-

fio d/y (what tide better speaks to a nostalgia for standard?) tells usthat the term has obscure oridns, but has come to mean "an affecta-tion or appreciation of manners and tastes commonly thought to beoutlandish, \..rlgar or banal . . . to act in an outlandish or eff€minatemanner."53 In all their uses, both kils.l and camp imply the imitation,the inauthentic, the impersonation. Their sigrificance lies in theirexaffierated display of th€ values of consumei culture. Fashion andtad rdle plnc€ within lhe domain of the fe;inine not simply becausethey are emblematic of the trivial. We must mov€ beyond any intrin-sic functjonal argument here that would say that the subieclis prior tothe feminine. Ralhelthe feminin$l_;mpersonation fgrJns a dj!-(ourse miminq the di \course of male produ(t iv i lv, authoriw, andpreolcatron nere. /\no t!19 trrIlDer [npetsonabon ol the lerTLl|newEEi6n <amFmar*s-$e--radicdl separatioD of "teminine-qlqeC$"lprnlhejgbjrct. This separation has arisen historically asa result of capital's need to place subjects heterogeneously through-out the labor market. And thus this seDantion has resulted in adenudint of the feminine, maUnS the diqrourse ol the feminine avail-able to parody. The "eternal feminine" presents a notion of the clas-sic, a notion of transcendence necessitated by the political e(onomy:the camp is its parody. -And this parody rcveal9 the Jeminine as sur-face, showing the deep face of ihe ferr-injne as a purely maierial-. --_--r-++.-,ebqqry lEl_Iglets! ul l wilhjn the c)rde of ex-chante and simultaneousl s,t\gir latllinvisihle. The conceP-

foman as consumer is no less fantastic or violent than itslitemlization in the .'d8ifia defitala rnylh, for it is a conception which

159 OBIECT5 OF DESIR€

functions to erase the true labor, the true prcductivity, ofwomen. Yetttus eEsure forms the very possibility of the cycl€ of exchang€.

If we say that the collechon in teneral marks the final erasure oflabor within the abstractions of late capitalism, we must conclude bysaying that kitsch and camp, as forms of metaconsumption, hav€arisen from the contradiction5 implicit in the operation of lhe ex-chante economy; they mark an antisubject whose emergence iron-ica[y has been n!@r@pulardasses have the ijlusion of luuitf, at all. The imitation as abstraition,as element of series, as novelty and luxu.y at once, is necessarily theclassic of contemporary consumer culture. This imitation marks thefinal vresting of the market away from the place we think we know,firsthand, as nature.

1 8 8 N O T E S T O P A C E S r 2 7 1 3 4

55. Hilliard, A Innrtr, p.62. We mightnote that Blake's resirtance to painrinSminiatures camc trom .1 strong ..iticism of their matenalty, a mateliality whichoverides any synboli. Jnd hislorical content they mitht possess. Thus he wn16in "A fretly llpiSntm fu the EnrertainDent of Those Who Have Paid creat Sunsin the Vrnrti.rn ird flcmish Ooze":

Nnht .nl Al nt lhis la(the/ SuitWltrt is hnst Crnid is nluals tfost MiflteRrho5 thittks Tables Chans ai.l Stools rt Glont)Brt Rnt'del thinks A tteo.l o foot o htnd.

Blake, The Poetry and Prar ol Wtlltun Biate, p. 505. See also Etdnan, Bltk!: prophetAiainn Enpie, p. 3u.

s6. Makinga simila. point, Simnelwntes: 'TverythinE rhat'adoms,man canbe ordered alonE a scale in tems of its closeness ro the physicat body. The'closest' adornment is typicalofnature peoples: ratrooing. The opposit€ exrremec represented by metal and stone adomments, whi.h are entirely unindividualand .an be put on by everytEdy." See "Adomment," in Ti. So.@iory of 6o/8Siadei, pp. 338-344 (quolation on p. 340).

s7. Ctrn$, European Litetuture antl the Latin Midtlle A36, p.316.58. Ibid., p. 330.59. Ibid., pp. 332-336.60. For a discussion, see Barkan, Nairr's Wa.k ol Art, p.9; and Cobger,

Theoties of Md.to@sns afld Micronms, p.7. Boas explains in "The Microcosn,,'chap. lO of The History of ldtos, pp. 2r9-22o:

The octuol uotd Jnicwoln'(littk uotld) a'as list uedfu PI|L. s pupil,Anstotk, ir hn Physi.s (252b, 26). He is olguing in this passage abort the @use olttotion nt the .osnos IIis s,ttene rtods, If tsell-initatedl notian mt occur in atatintol, the littk uo d, why iot in th. ldry aie? ' There ore ot ttust thrce thiiSsto be notice.l obart tis senten..: (1) the o ntul is for the fi9t tintc ullel ahttNoshj (2) nn aflitul tt.it is t1lDjected tnto the nstuos, tuhih later, in staicisn,uas to be colled d grta! aninnl (meBa zoo ); (3) the ,nicro.osn is not ,pecit'icaltynan. Oddlj! o@ugh, the thnd ol these uss flot d.uloped. wh.t oflc.oh6 rpof, theuo d at,e-<a, anf nn b

61. Con9.t, Theoties al MoqNasfls dn1 Mitr66ns, p.2A.62. Cunius, f.rrcpeofl Litetutre ofi the btih Middk 4g6, p. [A.63. Lotze, Microcosfrus, l:tiv.64. Napier, Tt. 8@t ol Natute and thE B@k al Man, pp. r2-r3.65. conAef, Theories ol MauNsfls and Mitfttns, p.7\.66. Batka\, Nsture's Wo* al A , p.2.67. Quoted in Barkan, p. 126.64. Conget, Theories ol Mai@asns and Mitu Bns, p. 45.69. Ib id. , p .64.70. Ib id. , p .88.71. lbid., pp. 111, 110.72. Napier, Trc 8@l of N, ture and thc B@k af Man, p. E.73. Conqet, Theories of Matbsns and Micrffisns, p. 136. See ajso ConBer,s

own treatise on mi.rocosmic philosophy, Syropti. Nailral$fl.

chaptet 5. Obje.ts ol Desne

l. H.B.l, Thr Pheroncnalagy of Mind, pp.105 106_2. Ior a discussion of reliquish, both religious and "sweet domesric," see

189 NOIES TO P,4CE5 t3,l 146

Ma.|ay, E nordi,&ry Poprlat Dclusn E. pp.695-702. One ofrhemost t.a8ic, andhumorcls, a..ounts or reliquhd m.y b€ lound in the final.haprer ol cius€pF dit mpedlsl ndel on the d{line oI lhe Sicilian nobitity, The Leopdta, pp.2 320.

3. RRording frcm Skate's Camival, WJshinsron, D.C., 1941, Archive of lolkColtue, Smith$nian Institulion, AFS #4699 4705. I would like to thank AmandaDargan and Steve Zeitlin for this t.anscrip(ion. l he .usrom of leceiving a souvenir(or purchasing one) of participation in or viewing of rhe spe.racle is, ofcourse, notlihited lo the freak show. In an adi.le on mech.nicC institure exhibitions beforel85r in En8land, Kusanitsu writ€sr "Spccimcn produ.ts liotu these model wo.k-inamachines were sld to the vGito6. Pieces of woven tibn.s.nd ci|no were inSeneral demand, and the girls ofthe Lady'sJubilc. Ch iry Schootof Mdnchesterin 1838 we.e 'hiShly delight€d ar beinS atlow.d kr rnke hom. with a pi.@ of@lico, whi.h wasprinted in their pres€nce, as a m.m.nkJ of this lheirlisr visir r0any popular erhibition."' Se Kusamitsu, "Crcat Erhibnn)ns b.Irc 18s1,, p 7eland Manchestq Cuordion, lanua.y 31, 1&a.

4. Freld, Stanrlnd Wotk,7:1s3 155 and 21:150-t57. Src iho schil$_ lsltrsoJ Inl.nati@tiot, pp. 98.99.

5- E o, Th@ry of Smioti*, p.?a7.6. Maccann€U, Ir€ Tohbl, p. 1s8.7. Ibid . o- 42-8- lbid., pp. l,A-r49.9. As an example, considet The Soulni: By the Lodies Lit.tury tt ior al rti,l,drk

Calege, Hi{s.lok Mi.h4an, AtA!* Ia6o:

Duting the y4/, the drunutarion ol nni.les uti en b4 henLvs of the uflioi infulflldent ol Indirniotul and Skirt! appoiahans is atsid*dbte: and, olthotshdM Mt tnblt, tt m! he dttiult Nt you to dt5,n, { oayttting wry *naAnbti -tthe nhnoal prodt tions, ene ol thm htte, ta rc, a @l lolue. That o/e theof[spring ol the hdrt inciderts t.}.ith, in athd dovs, @ shtll rennber uith asnile atd a t.ar, p6sibl! wilh both; drd as ue epatute, thde is d idtutuL desie tottke aith us copi6 of the,n, is M do af ea.h othd's lacet, os dl|umtlpes ol{en6in uhi.h, alas, @ shall ningle tq.ther no mor! . . os the fouttain ol sch@ttirfre.ott4liorc is trs@la| W its talknatic touch.

10. Sto.er and Crei6, Antiquorsi o d Taposnphical Cabircr, vol. 1, adverrise,

11. Andrew rnn8, prefa.e to Il. Folk-lore Rntd, vol. 2, p. iii; quoted inConnq Fotk-to/e Reti.s ol Eatlr viurge Life, p. a.

12. Fo6yth, The Antiqwry's Portlolio, 1:i. The introducrion ro Forsyth,s bookpreenls a oncie hGrory ofanriquananism in the Bdtish Isles to the bcSinning oIthe nineteenth century (l:v-xi).

13 li.an, E rits (t.ans. She.idan), p. 104.14. S€e Marshall, "Mr. Westfall's Baskers," De. 16&191.r5. Eliot, Atlon Bede, p. 543-16- "Et, encore une fois, par extension, les objek €xotiques: le d€paysement et

la diff€rance de latitude equivaut de toute fa(on pour l'hohm€ modehe a uneflon8eedans le passa (cf. le lourisne). Obj€ts faits main, indiSanes, bimbeloreriede tousles pays c esr morn.ld multiplnte p'uoF.que qu i fr scine q ue tanrenoniedes lomes cr des mode\ de fabn,drion, l'dllu,ion a un monde dnreneur. touiou^retay€ par.eluide l'enfa.ceet de ses iouets." Bauddlla:d, Le systtne ds bbieb, p.

17 Ros.e, fte Tolrisr Srat',3:5.

:-rI

I

1 9 0 N O T E S T O P A G E S 1 4 6 1 6 1

18. Harison, Tl! Iolrirr in Poftugol, p.289.19. Grab! , Eihnic ond Tounst Ans, pp.2-3.20. We llao find the curious inverEion of nativ€ us value rcplaed by a sitnul-

taneou3 loln5dc u*/display value when an anc€stral figurc is miniaturizld ddm.d€ into a boltle oFner, or, in the 6e of thc antique, when a candlslicl is

21. Gdbrm, Ethni. dn.l Torrisr Arls, p. 15.22. Basom, "Chandnt Afii@ Art " pp. 313-314.23. Crabrn, Ethnh and Ttutist Atts, p. 13.24. In het book, Sone tlobby Horser, Monti€soi concluds: "For, after all, the

Sreat$t delight which a coletion of any kind can affod is lhe lnenory of thedays in which it was formed; the happy holidays spent in '.rianging'; th€ brthtbtthdays, which added as a 8ift sone longed fo. sp<imelr the litll€ squabbl€sand argunents ov€r doub6rr ftasler; the n€w ideas tlean€d in 'eadinS it uy' "(p. 193). This niSht b€ cosideed an inri.nce of the uie of th€ coledion ssuvmn, padicularly since Montieso/s worl is ad.tres€d to childr€n a.ld issuftu*d with a nostalSia for the pastimes of her oM dndhood.

5. fle Majltre, Voya|. . on de tu .hamtu, p- 5r.26. B|lm, "Th€ Aesthetics of B.itish M€nantilism," p. 304.27. Baud.illald, L. S!611ru d6 obi.ts, p. 146.28. la6ea, Pitlciples ol Pswhotogy, 21a4.29. Baudrilard, k Sy6lC"e des obiets. pp. r47-r4a.x. Rigby, I$k, Stork. ahd Baftel, p.79.31. Hazliat, Th. Coit ColLctor, p. 15.32. Montiesor. So,ne Hoiry Hl)'g, pp. 190-19133. C'/Donnell, Miriarlrt , pp. 163, 165.34. Spitzer, "Milieu and Ambiane," p. 195. S€€ also Pr.z. Hittoty ol Inkrior

35. Vallois, Firsl Srrps i, Collectitg, pp.3-4.35. Van Loot, Kilg.Uen, and Elphinstone lp6€ud. of B@th TartinStonl Tra

Collecto{s Whttnot , pp. 144-145.37. De B6lzac, Cousin PoE, p.9.n. w.tsh, Hrndy-bek ol Utetury Cutixiti.s, pp.95_96.39- Baudritla.d, l" Sys.?ru des &ias, p. r3r.40. Dlsiaeli, Crniosilies ol Uttatuft. Zty3. sinjJarly, Walsh quoles rh€ Mar-

''l tn nbeL" h. stys, "one Wiig. oisit to e w -b@n bibliotunia ltto lodjust pwchasd .n etttnety turc 6tune qtot.d at a htulo"e prit . Itaoiag b.nSnciously Wtlitted bf its ounq to inspect th. trcasurc. I unturcd inno/-,ntly tofttu* thnt he htd pnbabry botght it oith the philrtthmpb intentio.l ol Inl,ing itrerinted. ' "Heooen fotbid!" ht ddnined. in a hotified tore; "hou @uld yousuwose ne upabt olsuctrrnactof IoU? VI1E/., Ebd*wuab&bag.tntu, and vould tule no oalue uhttftt. 8.!i.hs," hz ad.ld, "I ttoubt, ktue.noutsd%, il it k re h ftpinting." "ln thtt ut ," ed l, "Is nfl! .pF6 to Iiits ody attuiM." l6t e," h. Mpla.ntly ftdid; "a that is quit..noryh

'Natsh, Handy-book ol Litdary Qri6iti.s, p.95.41. vebten, The meory al th. Leisvre class, p. rr4.42. Canlck, Co\e.to/s Lucft, prefac€ (n.p.).43. Quoted in D'I8raeli, Curiositis of Litentut , \7-

l9l NoTESTO PAGES 162-168

44. Donato, "The Muslm's Fuhae,,, p. 223.45 Montie$r, soD. Hobrv Hotsa, o. t9i.46. Bunn, "The Aesrhetia of British Mercantilsm. .D. 3lZ.47. Ha^tt, Th. Cnn Colktor. o. t9.rlE. Baudrittard, "Fatichisme ea 'deoloqie,,, e. 2t7.49. Min, Gritar, D. 83.50. Veblen, D. l8{.51. Aaudrillard, L So(&id.t" @isnmtiod. po. t(h-rta.5a. See Cfassie, P.rrds 'r the Motnial fotkdnttute ot the fdsttn uiitpd Stat6.

p. 3J:. "ln.aeneml, folt matenat e\hibirs maior variatron ovei space and minoivaiidtion through lime. while the pdducisof populdr ora(ademi cutlure e\hibitmmd vanahon over spae and major variarion rhrough rime,,_ 53. For a cl.ssic analysis of rhe dimens'ons oI c.;p. s€e SontaS, .Nores on

ON LONGINGNarratiaes of the Miniature,the Souaenir , the Cttllectiorr

the Gigantic,

arFr€

,tl

Susan Stewart

Drllf ttriijc,'-ith/ Pf.ss DLLrhnu ntd LotLL1 1q93

First pap€lback cditionO r99l Dlke Un'versity Press

Inacd n tne L nned s t r$ u t Amen(d un d . rd . iR \ . pdper ,

onAinally published byJohns Hoptins Unive.sft, presj,n r96iI ibru,r ur ( on8rc.. cdrd.rB nB i; rubhdr,on Dri. dp.*,,un rhe |J\t Prinred paxe of th'\ buol

=ii;..=a(;. .l"

Y" q;-PLIN LVI 1 i : . l lY

... r'ri,,.tr,,v ,,/

For my mother and gra,d'nolhcrs-Delores Steroart, Alice Slewaft, a d Nellfu Brolun